Why Consumers Lie Online: Privacy Fears, Regulation and Data Fabrication

When people feel their personal data is at risk online, many do something quietly subversive: they lie. They invent email addresses, distort their birthdays, fabricate phone numbers and construct entire fake identities to shield themselves from companies that want to know them too well. A new study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications by Tajamul Islam and Ruby Chanda of Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies in Pune, India, examines this defensive behaviour in detail, tracing how perceptions of government regulation shape the tendency to fabricate personal information online. The research offers a technical but timely map of the psychological machinery that drives one of the most stubborn problems in digital commerce: consumers who deliberately corrupt the very data that businesses depend upon for personalisation.

The starting point of the study is a paradox that has grown sharper with every decade of the internet economy. Companies invest heavily in collecting customer data so that they can tailor products, recommendations and marketing messages to individual preferences. Yet the more aggressively they pursue this goal, the more exposed consumers feel, and the more likely they are to respond with defensive measures. Fabricating personal information is one of the most common of these measures, and it is uniquely damaging to firms because it poisons the data stream itself. A recommendation engine trained on invented preferences produces irrelevant suggestions; a personalised campaign aimed at a fictional persona wastes its budget. The researchers frame this behaviour not as random mischief but as a rational, protective response to perceived privacy risk.

To understand what triggers this protective response, the authors focus on a variable that has often been treated as background noise in consumer research: how people perceive the legal and regulatory environment that governs their data. Governments around the world have introduced frameworks intended to restrain how organisations collect, store and use personal information, and India has been building its own data protection architecture in recent years. The central hypothesis of the study is that these perceptions matter psychologically. When consumers believe that regulation effectively protects them, the argument goes, their sense of vulnerability should decline, and with it the anxiety that fuels defensive fabrication. When they doubt that regulators can or will restrain firms, the opposite should occur, and privacy concerns should intensify.

The study tests this idea through a well-established psychological pathway. Perceptions of regulatory protection are proposed to influence online privacy concern, which in turn drives the tendency to fabricate personal information. In technical terms, online privacy concern is modelled as a mediator: it is the psychological conduit through which regulatory perceptions are translated into behavioural outcomes. This mediation structure matters because it specifies the mechanism. It is not the law itself that changes behaviour, according to this model, but the feeling of safety or exposure that the law generates in the consumer’s mind. A regulation that exists on paper but is not perceived as protective will not reduce fabrication; a regulation that consumers trust can calm the anxieties that otherwise push them toward deception.

The data behind these claims came from an offline, pen-and-paper survey administered across several Indian states between June and November 2022. The choice of an offline survey is itself technically meaningful. Online panels are saturated with respondents who are already digitally engaged and often professionally experienced in answering questionnaires, which can bias studies of online behaviour. By collecting responses in person, with written informed consent supplemented by oral explanation of the study’s purpose, voluntary nature and confidentiality safeguards, the researchers reached a population whose relationship with the internet is more varied. All participants were adults aged eighteen or above, participation was voluntary and anonymous, and no sensitive personal data was collected. The authors note that their institute had not yet established a formal ethics committee at the time of data collection, so no formal approval number exists, but the study was conducted in line with the Declaration of Helsinki and relevant guidelines for human research.

Analysis of the survey responses involved mediation and moderated mediation analyses, the standard statistical machinery for testing chained and conditional psychological pathways. Mediation analysis asks whether the effect of one variable on another travels through an intermediate variable; moderated mediation adds a further layer by asking whether the strength of that entire pathway depends on a third variable. In this study, the moderator is internet usage, the intensity with which a person engages with the online world. The findings support the core model: online privacy concerns mediate the relationship between perceptions of legal and regulatory policies and the tendency to fabricate personal information, and internet usage moderates this relationship. The pathway from regulatory perception to data fabrication is not uniform across all consumers; it bends according to how deeply a person lives online.

The moderating role of internet usage is arguably the most practically interesting result. Heavy internet users encounter data collection constantly: cookie banners, tracking pixels, targeted advertisements, loyalty programmes and app permissions. Their perceptions of regulation and their privacy concerns are therefore continuously exercised, and the pathway linking the two to defensive behaviour operates under very different conditions than for light users. For someone who rarely goes online, the calculus of privacy risk is abstract and infrequent. For someone whose professional and social life runs through connected devices, the same calculus is a daily negotiation. The study’s moderated mediation framework captures this difference formally, showing that the psychological chain from regulation to concern to fabrication is conditioned by the consumer’s digital exposure.

The implications of the model cut in two directions, toward policymakers and toward businesses. For regulators, the results suggest that the effectiveness of data protection law depends not only on its legal content but on its public perception. A framework that consumers do not understand, trust or notice may fail to reduce privacy anxiety, and therefore fail to reduce the defensive fabrication that undermines digital markets. Communication about regulatory rights, enforcement actions and visible protections becomes part of the regulatory instrument itself. For businesses, the findings are a warning about the hidden cost of aggressive data collection. Every interaction that heightens a consumer’s sense of surveillance risks corrupting the data on which personalisation depends, creating a self-defeating loop in which the pursuit of customer knowledge destroys the quality of the knowledge obtained.

There are also broader lessons about trust and transparency in online environments. The study positions fabrication not as an isolated consumer quirk but as a symptom of a systemic trust deficit, one that regulation, corporate practice and individual behaviour jointly determine. Consumers fabricate information when they perceive heightened risk, and that perception is shaped by the regulatory signals they receive and by the intensity of their own internet exposure. Reducing defensive behaviour therefore requires more than technical security measures; it requires building genuine confidence that personal data is handled responsibly. The authors argue that these insights are valuable for policymakers and businesses striving to enhance trust and transparency online, and the underlying message is that the battle for data quality will be won or lost in the consumer’s perception long before it reaches the database.

The research also contributes methodologically to a literature that has often relied on online convenience samples. By grounding the analysis in an offline survey across multiple Indian states, the study captures a developing digital economy in which internet usage varies widely and regulatory awareness is still forming. India’s data protection landscape has been evolving rapidly, and consumer attitudes there reflect a population negotiating the transition between traditional commerce and pervasive digital platforms. Understanding how regulatory perceptions, privacy concerns and usage intensity interact in such a context provides a technically grounded template for studying defensive consumer behaviour elsewhere, particularly in markets where digital adoption is accelerating faster than regulatory trust can be established. As personalisation becomes ever more central to digital business models, the quiet act of inventing a fake birthday may prove to be one of the most consequential signals a consumer can send.

Subject of Research: Consumer data fabrication driven by privacy concerns and regulatory perceptions

Article Title: Understanding defensive consumer actions – the interplay of privacy concerns, regulations, and internet usage

Article References: Islam, T., & Chanda, R. (2026). Understanding defensive consumer actions – the interplay of privacy concerns, regulations, and internet usage. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09542-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09542-5

Keywords: Understanding, defensive, consumer, actions, interplay, privacy, concerns, regulations, internet, usage, scientific research