What's your Internet privacy personality?

Why are some of us content to share more online while others are more comfortable keeping a low profile? It has everything to do with personality, according to a recent study from MasterCard that found that traditional demographics such as age, gender and race are actually poor indicators of individual attitudes toward online privacy.

Theodore Iacobuzio, MasterCard’s vice president in charge of “global insights,” said that demographics are really secondary in gauging how people feel about online privacy and that the main indicator lies in users’ motivations for going online. Based on MasterCard’s research, Iacobuzio and his team defined five privacy online personality types: passive users, proactive protectors, solely shoppers, open sharers and simply interactors. For merchants, he said, there’s also value in identifying certain types of people based on their activity, such as “open sharers” or “solely shoppers.” Those two personality types alone make up around 40 percent of all online shoppers, he said, and if companies can identify those users, then they can make their ads more focused and efficient.