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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Big Data
Sec. Data Science
Volume 8 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdata.2025.1477911
This article is part of the Research Topic Misinformation and Misbehavior Mining on the Web View all 4 articles

Balancing Act: Europeans' Privacy Calculus and Security Concerns in online CSAM Detection

Provisionally accepted
Razvan Rughinis Razvan Rughinis 1Simona Nicoleta Vulpe Simona Nicoleta Vulpe 2*Dinu Turcanu Dinu Turcanu 3Daniel Rosner Daniel Rosner 1
  • 1 Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
  • 2 University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
  • 3 Technical University of Moldova, Chișinău, Moldova

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This study examines privacy calculus in online child sexual abuse material (CSAM) detection across Europe, using Flash Eurobarometer 532 data. Drawing on theories of structuration and risk society, we analyze how individual agency and institutional frameworks interact in shaping privacy attitudes in high-stakes digital scenarios. Multinomial regression reveals age as a significant individual-level predictor, with younger individuals prioritizing privacy more. Country-level analysis shows Central and Eastern European nations have higher privacy concerns, reflecting distinct institutional and cultural contexts. Notably, the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) shows a positive association with privacy concerns in regression models when controlling for Augmented Human Development Index (AHDI) components, contrasting its negative bivariate correlation. Life expectancy emerges as the strongest country-level predictor, negatively associated with privacy concerns, suggesting deep institutional mechanisms shape privacy attitudes beyond individual factors. This dual approach reveals that both individual factors and national contexts are shaping privacy calculus in CSAM detection. The study contributes to a better understanding of privacy calculus in high-stakes scenarios, with implications for policy development in online child protection.

    Keywords: Privacy calculus, privacy concerns, age, CSAM detection, Eurobarometer, regression, Desi, AHDI

    Received: 08 Aug 2024; Accepted: 03 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Rughinis, Vulpe, Turcanu and Rosner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Simona Nicoleta Vulpe, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.