Following numerous incidences of money fraud, illegal immigration, crime and terrorist plots in cities around the globe, security has risen to the forefront of political discourse and debate, particularly in the UK. As politicians and policy makers have scrambled to respond to implement measures intended to improve the security of the public, it is widely agreed that in many cases these policy measures have raised privacy and data protection concerns. In particular, security interventions may involve significant changes in the everyday-life activities of citizens who are now faced with situations where they have to give up some of their personal data and liberties. In this context, it is important to address the extent to which individuals are prepared to give up personal data and liberties in exchange for a possibly safer and more secure existence. To our knowledge, previous research in this area has been solely based on the opinions and attitudes of policy officials, focusing mainly on the different ways of implementing security measures. Therefore, little is known about how individuals trade-off in quantitative terms between security, privacy and liberty.

This paper uses stated choices experiments to examine the corresponding trade-offs between privacy, security and liberty of individuals under three routine-life cases including the passport application procedure, rail travel and attendance of a major public event (e.g., opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics). The experiments were administered through the Internet and involved 2,098 UK residents who were registered with a national-based internet-users database. The socio-demographic profiles of respondents are a close-match to the census population in terms of gender, age, income and place of residence. Discrete choice models are used to examine how individuals trade-off between attributes of privacy, security and liberty in each scenario-case and are also used to explore whether there are significant behavioural differences between segments in the sample including groups with different perceptions and attitudes.