FROM CALCULUS TO SUPPRESSION: RECONCEPTUALISING THE PRIVACY TRADE-OFF IN PERSONALISED ADVERTISING UNDER WEAK ENFORCEMENT

The prevailing account of how consumers make privacy decisions is the privacy calculus, which models disclosure and engagement as a trade in which the benefits of personalisation are weighed against the expected cost to privacy. This paper argues that the calculus is conditional on an institution that most of its evidence has held constant, namely credible enforcement of data protection. Where enforcement is credible, the privacy cost is bounded, because misuse carries consequences and consumers retain recourse, and the calculus behaves as a compensatory trade in which personalisation benefits can offset concern. Where enforcement is weak, the cost is unbounded and non-negotiable, and the trade does not clear. Under that condition privacy concern ceases to function as a term to be weighed and begins to function as a suppressor, one that increases in personalisation cannot offset. The paper develops the construct of privacy suppression, formalises the returns to personalisation as an enforcement-conditional inverted-U in which the peak shifts lower and the decline steepens as enforcement weakens, and proposes a typology of privacy postures adapted to weak-enforcement markets, in which a resigned posture rather than the pragmatist of established segmentations becomes the majority case. Survey evidence from web users in an emerging Nigerian market, where privacy and platform mistrust were the most intensely held attitudes and the strongest negative correlate of purchase, motivates the account. The paper offers six propositions, a conceptual model, boundary conditions, and a testing agenda. Its contribution is to make the privacy calculus conditional on enforcement, and to specify what replaces it where enforcement fails.