The rapidly changing world creates actual or perceived insecurities for many people. As a response to security threats, governments around the globe, albeit in different magnitude, have implemented measures of mass surveillance. Regardless of prominent (normative) debates on surveillance and security, studies examining individual attitudes and factors explaining them have been relatively scarce. While people in general prefer living in a secure environment, we argue that it is not only the imminent trade-off between security concerns and protecting one’s privacy and freedom that ultimately persuades citizens to support surveillance measures. We expect that the support of such policies also depends on financial costs, their impact on individual convenience, the design of the policies as well as the context in which they are implemented. With the underlying study, we contribute to the literature by increasing our understanding of what makes people agree to proposed security measures and how efficient they perceive them to be.

Using a factorial survey experiment, we measure the causal effects of the threat level, the strength of privacy interventions, financial costs, and time resources on the approval of security measures and their expected efficiency. The pre-registered experiment was conducted with 5,000 respondents in Germany. Results show that German citizens are in general willing to accept the introduction of far-reaching surveillance measures, but that related financial costs and individual convenience significantly influence such support. Context, in this case whether a safety threat is salient, however, has no effect on individual support.