Harnessing Soft Logic to Represent the Privacy Paradox

The digital era introduces a significant issue concerning the preservation of individuals’ privacy. Each individual has two autonomous traits, privacy concern which indicates how anxious that person is about preserving privacy, and privacy behavior which refers to the actual actions the individual takes to preserve privacy. The significant gap between these two traits is called the privacy paradox. While the existence and the extensive distribution of the privacy paradox is widely-considered in both academic and public discussion, no convincing explanation of the phenomenon has been provided. In this study we harness a new mathematical approach, “soft logic,” to better represent the reality of the privacy paradox. Soft numbers extend zero from a singularity to an infinite one-dimensional axis, thus enabling the representation of contradictory situations that exist simultaneously, i.e., a paradox. We develop a mathematical model for representing the privacy paradox with soft numbers, and demonstrate its application empirically. This new theory has the potential to address domains that mix soft human reality with robust technological reality.