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arxiv: 2603.01992 · v2 · submitted 2026-03-02 · 💻 cs.CY · cs.HC

Does Travel Stage Matter? How Leisure Travellers Perceive Their Privacy Attitudes Towards Personal Data Sharing Before, During, and After Travel

Haiyue Yuan , Shujun Li , Fatima Gillani , Xiao Ma This is my paper

Pith reviewed 2026-05-15 17:04 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.CY cs.HC
keywords privacy attitudespersonal data sharingleisure traveltravel stagessocial media sharingsurvey studycontext-dependent privacydemographic influences
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The pith

Leisure travellers' privacy attitudes toward sharing personal data shift with travel stage and purpose, though social media patterns stay steady.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper examines whether the stage of a leisure trip affects how people feel about sharing their personal information. Through a survey of 318 participants, it reveals that attitudes shift depending on what data is shared and why, as well as the timing before, during, or after travel. Notably, people are more comfortable sharing basic info like names for bookings but less so for other data, and social media use for travel content doesn't change much across stages. Factors like gender and travel habits also play a role. This matters because understanding these nuances can help design better privacy protections for travel services.

Core claim

Analysing data from an online survey with 318 participants, the authors found that participants' privacy attitudes towards sharing different personal data vary based on sharing purposes and travel stages. Participants exhibited a more relaxed attitude towards sharing commonly sensitive personal data such as name and gender compared to other types. Social media content sharing was minimal on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Twitter but more common on Facebook and Instagram, with this pattern remaining consistent across the three travel stages. A participant's gender, previous travel frequency, and country of residence were found to influence perceptions of personaldata

What carries the argument

Online survey measuring self-reported privacy attitudes of 318 leisure travellers at pre-travel, during-travel, and post-travel stages for different data types and sharing purposes.

If this is right

  • Privacy attitudes are context-dependent on the specific travel stage and the purpose of sharing.
  • Basic personal data required for bookings is viewed as less sensitive than other data types.
  • Social media sharing patterns for travel content do not shift meaningfully across travel stages.
  • Demographic factors such as gender, travel frequency, and country of residence shape privacy perceptions.
  • The findings can inform the design of privacy features in travel booking and social media services.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • Travel service providers could time data requests to match users' greater comfort levels at certain stages to reduce friction.
  • The stability of social media habits suggests privacy interventions should focus on platform differences rather than travel timing.
  • Comparing self-reported attitudes with observed sharing logs in future work would test whether reported changes match real behavior.
  • Similar stage-dependent patterns may appear in other domains such as health or finance data sharing during life events.

Load-bearing premise

Self-reported survey responses accurately reflect participants' actual privacy attitudes and behaviors across travel stages without significant social desirability bias or recall error.

What would settle it

A study tracking actual data sharing rates from booking platforms and social media accounts across real trips that finds no variation by stage would challenge the claim that attitudes change with travel stage.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2603.01992 by Fatima Gillani, Haiyue Yuan, Shujun Li, Xiao Ma.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Bar chart showing mean and standard deviation of comfortableness scores of sharing di [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p009_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Comparison of average comfortableness scores and comfortableness scores di [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Participants’ self-reported sharing behaviour for three travel stages: [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p013_3.png] view at source ↗
read the original abstract

People's attitudes towards personal data sharing have been extensively researched, however, limited research studied their evolving nature in across different stages of a leisure trip. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how leisure travellers' attitudes towards sharing personal data change before, during and after travel. Analysing data from an online survey with 318 participants, we found that participants' privacy attitudes towards sharing different personal data vary based on sharing purposes and travel stages. Interestingly, participants exhibited a more relaxed attitude towards sharing commonly sensitive personal data (e.g., name, gender) compared to other types of personal data. This is likely because sharing such data for travel bookings has become essential and widely accepted among travellers when using booking sites, which is in line with previous work stating that information easily obtainable is typically not seen as highly confidential. Moreover, despite participants' self-reported frequent use of social media platforms, content sharing is minimal on TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Twitter. Conversely, Facebook and Instagram were more common for travel-related content sharing. This pattern remains consistent across the three stages of travel, suggesting that the stage of travel does not significantly influence how people share on social media platforms, which has been overlooked in past studies. Furthermore, we discovered that a participant's gender, previous travel frequency, and country of residence can influence their perceptions of personal data sharing at different travel stages, confirming the complex and context-dependent nature of privacy perception and attitudes. Based on the findings observed from this study, we further discuss implications and potential contributions of our work to the privacy and security community in general.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 2 minor

Summary. The paper reports results from a cross-sectional online survey of 318 leisure travelers on how privacy attitudes toward sharing different personal data types (e.g., name, location, biometrics) vary by sharing purpose and by travel stage (before, during, after). Key findings include more relaxed attitudes toward basic identifiers than toward other data, minimal content sharing on most platforms except Facebook and Instagram with no stage differences, and moderating effects of gender, prior travel frequency, and country of residence.

Significance. If the measurement is valid, the work adds a travel-specific, stage-sensitive lens to the privacy-attitudes literature and supplies descriptive evidence that could inform context-aware privacy controls in booking and social platforms. The demographic moderators are a modest but useful extension of prior context-dependent privacy models.

major comments (2)
  1. [Methods] Methods and Results sections: The central claim that attitudes vary by travel stage rests on retrospective self-reports for the 'during' and 'after' phases collected in a single cross-sectional instrument. No behavioral logs, experience-sampling, or longitudinal component is described, so the reported stage differences cannot be separated from recall bias or social-desirability effects that are known to affect privacy surveys.
  2. [Results] Results and Discussion: Post-hoc demographic splits (gender, travel frequency, country) are presented without pre-registered hypotheses, correction for multiple comparisons, or power analysis. With 318 participants, several subgroup cells are likely small, raising the risk that the reported moderators are spurious or sample-specific.
minor comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: The sentence on social-media platform usage would be clearer if it distinguished between platform adoption and travel-related content sharing frequency.
  2. [Discussion] The manuscript would benefit from an explicit limitations subsection that directly addresses retrospective reporting and the absence of behavioral validation.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive comments, which help strengthen the methodological transparency and interpretive caution in our work. We address each major comment below and outline planned revisions.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [Methods] Methods and Results sections: The central claim that attitudes vary by travel stage rests on retrospective self-reports for the 'during' and 'after' phases collected in a single cross-sectional instrument. No behavioral logs, experience-sampling, or longitudinal component is described, so the reported stage differences cannot be separated from recall bias or social-desirability effects that are known to affect privacy surveys.

    Authors: We agree that the study relies on a single cross-sectional survey with retrospective self-reports for the during and after stages. This design choice was driven by the practical challenges of longitudinal tracking across actual travel periods, which is common in privacy-attitude research. We will revise the manuscript to add an expanded Limitations subsection that explicitly discusses potential recall bias and social-desirability effects, qualifies the stage-difference findings as perceptions rather than observed behavior, and recommends future experience-sampling or longitudinal studies for validation. revision: partial

  2. Referee: [Results] Results and Discussion: Post-hoc demographic splits (gender, travel frequency, country) are presented without pre-registered hypotheses, correction for multiple comparisons, or power analysis. With 318 participants, several subgroup cells are likely small, raising the risk that the reported moderators are spurious or sample-specific.

    Authors: The demographic moderator analyses were exploratory and not pre-registered. In the revision we will (1) explicitly label them as such in the Results and Discussion, (2) add a post-hoc power analysis for the subgroup comparisons, (3) apply a multiple-comparison correction (Bonferroni) to the reported tests, and (4) report cell sizes, effect sizes, and confidence intervals while cautioning against overgeneralization given smaller subgroup samples. These changes will temper the claims without removing the descriptive findings. revision: partial

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity: empirical survey study with direct data analysis and no derivations or self-referential predictions.

full rationale

This is a purely empirical paper reporting results from an online survey of 318 participants on leisure travelers' privacy attitudes. The central claims (variation by sharing purpose and travel stage, platform-specific sharing patterns, demographic influences) are presented as direct observations from the collected responses. No equations, fitted parameters, theoretical derivations, or predictions appear in the abstract or described structure. References to prior work provide context only and are not invoked as uniqueness theorems or load-bearing justifications that reduce the findings to self-citation. The study is self-contained against external benchmarks as standard survey analysis without circular loops.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The central claim rests on the domain assumption that survey self-reports capture genuine privacy attitudes and that the 318-participant sample is sufficiently representative of leisure travelers.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Self-reported survey responses reliably reflect participants' privacy attitudes and behaviors
    The study infers attitude changes solely from online survey answers without cross-validation against actual data-sharing logs or observed behavior.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5603 in / 1105 out tokens · 32328 ms · 2026-05-15T17:04:29.436695+00:00 · methodology

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Reference graph

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