The privacy paradox: Why privacy concerned users disclose personal data

The loss of privacy is one of the most powerful challenges associated with the Internet media. Information privacy is an important topic of empirical and theoretical research mostly focused on the level of information privacy concerns. Regular monitoring of public opinion on this sensitive issue revealed the “privacy paradox”: Internet users express concern about information privacy and report a desire to protect their data but disclose personal data for a small reward and rarely make efforts to protect their privacy. The privacy paradox is widely considered in Englishlanguage works, while in Russia, there are only a few studies and no complete overview of the current relevant theoretical explanations of the paradox. The article aims at presenting the most popular and widespread theoretical explanations of the privacy paradox. Based on the conceptual, comparative and integrative analysis of empirical, theoretical and review articles in English, the article identifies the following relevant ways for explaining the privacy paradox: the theory of privacy calculus, the theory of decision biases and bounded rationality, the model of social influence and exchange, the privacy paradox as a methodological artefact, the privacy cynicism and digital resignation. The very existence of several strategies for explaining the paradox of privacy suggests that it has not yet received a final solution. The most promising direction seems to be integration of the above-mentioned explanatory models and contextualization of general theories in relation to specific cases.