The ethics of privacy in charitable crowdfunding for oneself using semi-structured interviews with 24 participants

The practice of donation-based crowdfunding has grown rapidly in recent years, with more than US$30 billion raised, in donations, on GoFundMe alone. Online donation-based crowdfunding campaigns can be created for oneself or on behalf of others to seek donations from friends, family, and the wider public. Crowdfunding campaigners experience significant pressure to share substantial financial, medical, and other personal information as part of their crowdfunding campaigns. Due to this pressure, privacy-related concerns in crowdfunding are widespread. However, to date there has been limited research exploring the privacy-related impacts of crowdfunding. To address this gap, interviews were conducted with 24 crowdfunding campaigners who were crowdfunding for their own health- and housing-related needs. First, these interviews were analyzed to determine the privacy-related concerns of campaigners and the advice they had for others considering crowdfunding. Second, interviews were analyzed to determine how the approach campaigners took to privacy in everyday life functioned in the context of crowdfunding, while campaigners experienced various forms of tension and pressure. Our evidence shows that giving up personal information related to basic living needs can heighten campaigners' vulnerability and elicit questions, judgement, and probing from members of the public. Openly displaying information that is considered intimate and sensitive not only leads to a loss of informational privacy for campaigners, but also compromises the ability of campaigners to make autonomous privacy-related decisions.