Calculus interdependency,personality contingency,and causal asymmetry: Toward a configurational privacy calculus model of information disclosure

This study proposes a configurational privacy calculus model (CPCM) to understand calculus interdependency, personality contingency, and causal asymmetry in the information disclosure behavior in social networking sites (SNS). The results based on qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) showed that high disclosure can be caused by the configurations with the presence of at least one perceived benefit among the three types of benefits (i.e., self-expression, life documentation, and social rewards) while the absence of privacy risks, or the configurations with the presence of both perceived benefits and privacy risks meanwhile with the presence of behavioral activation system (BAS) but the absence of behavioral inhibition system (BIS). In contrast, low disclosure can be caused by the configurations with the absence of all the three types of perceived benefits, or the configurations with the presence of both perceived benefits and privacy risks meanwhile with the presence of BIS, but the absence of BAS.     

An Extended Privacy Calculus Model for SNSs: Analyzing Self‐Disclosure and Self‐Withdrawal in a Representative U.S. Sample

The privacy calculus established that online self‐disclosures are based on a cost‐benefit tradeoff. For the context of SNSs, however, the privacy calculus still needs further support as most studies consist of small student samples and analyze self‐disclosure only, excluding self‐withdrawal (e.g., the deletion of posts), which is essential in SNS contexts. Thus, this study used a U.S. representative sample to test the privacy calculus' generalizability and extend its theoretical framework by including both self‐withdrawal behaviors and privacy self‐efficacy. Results confirmed the extended privacy calculus model. Moreover, both privacy concerns and privacy self‐efficacy positively predicted use of self‐withdrawal. With regard to predicting self‐disclosure in SNSs, benefits outweighed privacy concerns; regarding self‐withdrawal, privacy concerns outweighed both privacy self‐efficacy and benefits.     

Why do users continue using social networking sites? An exploratory study of members in the United States and Taiwan

In this paper, we draw on an extended Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT) to explore factors that affect members’ continued use intention toward Social Networking Sites (SNSs). We also theorize about the intricate relationships among a variety of UGT constructs. Further, we conduct this research in a global context by comparing SNS use in the United States and Taiwan. Empirical survey data are collected to validate the research model, and several intriguing findings are observed. Our research results indicate that four determinants, i.e., gratifications, perceived critical mass, subjective norms, and privacy concerns, influence SNS users’ continuance intention and that regional differences moderate the effects of both gratifications and privacy concerns on continuance intention. Our study makes noticeable contributions to the literature on UGT and SNSs. The findings reported also inform service providers in developing better strategies for member retention.     

Securing online privacy: An empirical test on Internet scam victimization,online privacy concerns,and privacy protection behaviors

The current study identified the antecedents of being an Internet scam victim and how it impacts online privacy concerns and privacy protection behaviors. Structural equation modeling on data from a survey of 11,534 Internet users revealed that one indicator of weak self-control (i.e., willingness of risky investments) and two indicators of routine Internet activities (i.e., online shopping and opening emails from unknown sources) positively predicted being an Internet scam victim. Subsequently, being an Internet scam victim predicted increased online privacy concerns, which, in turn, predicted elevated privacy protection behaviors. Moreover, we found that being an Internet scam victim mediated the effects of routine Internet activities on privacy protection behaviors and that online privacy concerns mediated the effect of being an Internet scam on privacy protection behaviors. Unlike most Internet privacy studies using protection motivation theory only, the current study contributes to the understanding of the Internet scam victimization by incorporating three new theories—extended parallel process model, self-control theory, and routine activity theory. The research findings provided valuable implications for theory and practice related to Internet scam processes and prevention.     

The role of affect and cognition on online consumers' decision to disclose personal information to unfamiliar online vendors

Based on the privacy calculus framework and the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model, this study examines online information disclosure decision as a result of affective and cognitive reactions of online consumers over several stages, i.e. an initial stage where an overall impression is formed about an unfamiliar online vendor, and a subsequent information exchange stage where information necessary to complete the ecommerce transaction will be provided to the online vendor. We found that, initial emotions formed from an overall impression of a Web site act as initial hurdles to information disclosure. Once online consumers enter the information exchange stage, fairness-based levers further adjust privacy beliefs.     

Interplay between trust,information privacy concerns and behavioural intention of users on online social networks

Trust and privacy features of websites have evolved as an important concern for any businesses or interactions, particularly in online networks. The study investigates the relationship between trust, privacy concerns and behavioural intention of users on the social network. The behavioural intention of users on the online social network (OSN) is captured by intention to disclose information and intention to interact with others in OSN. The study was conducted on a sample of 457 active users from one of the major social networking website, Facebook. Partial least squares based structural equation modelling was used for analysing the results. The findings of the study reveal that intention to disclose information mediates the relationship between trust in the website and the intention to interact with others. Another important finding of the study indicates that prior positive experience with the website significantly impacts the trust in website, and the trust in website also plays a crucial role while determining the information privacy concerns in the OSN.     

Exploring privacy paradox in information-sensitive mobile app adoption: A cross-cultural comparison

This paper proposes and tests a conceptual model of private-information sensitive mobile app adoption utilizing privacy calculus approach. It also explores the role of personality in affecting perceived benefits of using mobile apps and compares the findings across two countries: the US and China. Irrespective of the cultural environment, millennial mobile app users download apps that require access to sensitive personal information in order to satisfy their informational and social (but not entertainment) needs. Perceived privacy concern does not influence adoption or future use of private-information sensitive apps. Extraversion and agreeableness are positively related to user perceptions of benefits obtained from using apps.     

Online self-disclosure: The privacy paradox explained as a temporally discounted balance between concerns and rewards

Technological innovations are increasingly helping people expand their social capital through online networks by offering new opportunities for sharing personal information. Online social networks are perceived to provide individuals new benefits and have led to a surge of personal data uploaded, stored, and shared. While privacy concerns are a major issue for many users of social networking sites, studies have shown that their information disclosing behavior does not align with their concerns. This gap between behavior and concern is called the privacy paradox. Several theories have been explored to explain this, but with inconsistent and incomplete results. This study investigates the paradox using a construal level theory lens. We show how a privacy breach, not yet experienced and psychologically distant, has less weight in everyday choices than more concrete and psychologically-near social networking activities and discuss the implications for research and practice.     

Saving face on Facebook: privacy concerns,social benefits,and impression management

The nearly ubiquitous use of online social networks generally entails substantial personal disclosure and elicits significant privacy concerns. This research uses Social Exchange Theory and the impression management (IM) literature to examine how privacy concerns can be counterbalanced by the perceived social benefits afforded by a social network’s ability to support IM. We frame social network use as an attempt to engage in IM, and we highlight the importance of a social network’s IM affordances in predicting social benefits from, and disclosure through, a social network. We test our model with a sample of 244 Facebook users, finding support for the proposed relationships and yielding the following contributions. First, this research provides a novel positioning of perceived IM affordances as a primary driver of both perceived social benefits and IM disclosure propensity. Second, this research illuminates that trust in both the social network provider and social network peers influences privacy concerns, social benefits, and perceived IM affordances. Our theory has important implications for researchers and practitioners interested in privacy issues within social networks.     

Privacy,trust and control: Which relationships with online self-disclosure?

A number of studies have examined the relationship between privacy concerns, perceived control over information, trust and online self-disclosure, highlighting different points of view to understand this connection. This paper intends to compare these different models of explanation for self-disclosure behaviors in online social networks. Three different hypotheses are verified, using mediation and moderation analyses. The results allow underling the effect of the interaction between privacy concerns and trust on online self-disclosure, along with the absence of a direct influence of privacy concerns on disclosure itself. The results suggest practical implications for online social network providers, most of all with regard to privacy policies in online environments.     

Dimensionality of information disclosure behavior

In studies of people's privacy behavior, the extent of disclosure of personal information is typically measured as a summed total or a ratio of disclosure. In this paper, we evaluate three information disclosure datasets using a six-step statistical analysis, and show that people's disclosure behaviors are rather multidimensional: participants' disclosure of personal information breaks down into a number of distinct factors. Moreover, people can be classified along these dimensions into groups with different “disclosure styles”. This difference is not merely in degree, but rather also in kind: one group may for instance disclose location-related but not interest-related items, whereas another group may behave exactly the other way around. We also found other significant differences between these groups, in terms of privacy attitudes, behaviors, and demographic characteristics. These might for instance allow an online system to classify its users into their respective privacy group, and to adapt its privacy practices to the disclosure style of this group. We discuss how our results provide relevant insights for a more user-centric approach to privacy and, more generally, advance our understanding of online privacy behavior.     

Factors mediating disclosure in social network sites

In this paper, we explore how privacy settings and privacy policy consumption (reading the privacy policy) affect the relationship between privacy attitudes and disclosure behaviors. We present results from a survey completed by 122 users of Facebook regarding their information disclosure practices and their attitudes about privacy. Based on our data, we develop and evaluate a model for understanding factors that affect how privacy attitudes influence disclosure and discuss implications for social network sites. Our analysis shows that the relationship between privacy attitudes and certain types of disclosures (those furthering contact) are controlled by privacy policy consumption and privacy behaviors. This provides evidence that social network sites could help mitigate concerns about disclosure by providing transparent privacy policies and privacy controls.     

Web assurance seal services,trust and consumers’ concerns: an investigation of e-commerce transaction intentions across two nations

Trust is considered as a critical enabler in reducing consumer concerns regarding e-commerce transactions. Another enabler that helps reduce consumers’ concerns is Web Assurance Seal Services (WASS). We suggest that both factors help in the reduction of a critical hindrance to e-commerce, namely consumer concerns, and foster e-commerce transactions. Prior research has focused on trust in e-commerce, and separately, on the effectiveness of WASS within certain nations or cultures. However, given that e-commerce is now a global phenomenon we contend that the national or cultural characteristics of consumers are important to understand. This comparative national research attempts to fill this gap. This study makes the following contributions: It identifies a hindrance (i.e., consumers’ concerns), and two enablers (i.e., effectiveness of WASS and trust) in e-commerce technologies as a shopping channel (i.e., trust in e-Channel). It proposes consumers’ concerns for e-commerce as a second-order three-dimensional construct (i.e., security, privacy, and business integrity concern) and compares the effects of trust in e-Channel and WASS on consumers’ e-commerce transaction intention in two different national/cultural contexts (i.e., the U.S.A. and South Korea). The results of the study indicate that the perceived effectiveness of WASS of the U.S. consumers has a strong positive impact on their transaction intention and has a strong negative influence on their concerns for e-commerce. In contrast, Korean consumers’ perceived effectiveness of WASS does not significantly influence their transaction intention and their concerns for e-commerce. The results of group comparison analysis confirm that the strength of perceived effectiveness of WASS of the U.S. consumers is significantly stronger than that of Korean consumers. Interpretations from a cross-national perspective, theoretical and practical implications as well as limitations are discussed.     

Agile systems development: Privacy theoretical lens to challenge the full information disclosure paradigm.

Software development requires intense collaboration within, across teams, and with the client. Since the popularization of agile software development in the 2000s, the virtuous effects of transparent collaboration have been emphasized. However, some studies have alluded to concerns with full information disclosure and mentioned that teams may benefit by withholding some information. We used case studies to explore such situations. We adopted a privacy theoretical lens because it is antithetical to the information disclosure lens and offers frames to comprehend how professional information can be retained by individuals, shared to restricted circles or entirely divulged. We found situations when the disclosure paradigm is challenged in agile processes. There is ambiguity in the disclosure message because individual and collective information retention do play a role in agile development. Our findings help refine information systems development philosophies and practices. We also extend our understanding of the communication privacy management theory to a context where full disclosure is preferred to privacy, and where control over privacy depends on allowances granted by a third party, which can generalize to other settings (e.g., social media platforms).     

A hybrid solution for privacy preserving medical data sharing in the cloud environment

Storing and sharing of medical data in the cloud environment, where computing resources including storage is provided by a third party service provider, raise serious concern of individual privacy for the adoption of cloud computing technologies. Existing privacy protection researches can be classified into three categories, i.e., privacy by policy, privacy by statistics, and privacy by cryptography. However, the privacy concerns and data utilization requirements on different parts of the medical data may be quite different. The solution for medical dataset sharing in the cloud should support multiple data accessing paradigms with different privacy strengths. The statistics or cryptography technology alone cannot enforce the multiple privacy demands, which blocks their application in the real-world cloud. This paper proposes a practical solution for privacy preserving medical record sharing for cloud computing. Based on the classification of the attributes of medical records, we use vertical partition of medical dataset to achieve the consideration of different parts of medical data with different privacy concerns. It mainly includes four components, i.e., (1) vertical data partition for medical data publishing, (2) data merging for medical dataset accessing, (3) integrity checking, and (4) hybrid search across plaintext and ciphertext, where the statistical analysis and cryptography are innovatively combined together to provide multiple paradigms of balance between medical data utilization and privacy protection. A prototype system for the large scale medical data access and sharing is implemented. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed solution.     

Should I Share That? Prompting Social Norms That Influence Privacy Behaviors on a Social Networking Site

This study examines how explicit and implicit cues to social norms affect disclosure and privacy decisions in a Social Network Site (SNS) context. Study 1 revealed that participants' disclosure behavior adhered to explicit cues indicating disclosure frequency norms, while implicit social norm cues (i.e., surveillance primes) acted to increase overall disclosure frequency and affect disclosure accuracy when explicit cues discourage disclosure. Study 2 explored how these cues affected privacy‐setting decisions and found that explicit cues indicating others' privacy settings could increase how strictly participants set their privacy settings, but the implicit cues had no effect. These results suggest that explicit cues about SNS norms can trigger bandwagon heuristic processing, and that, under limited circumstances, surveillance primes can affect self‐disclosure.     

Disclosing too much? Situational factors affecting information disclosure in social commerce environment

The buying and selling of goods and services are no longer limited to a general website or a physical store as social networks, such as Facebook or Pinterest, are heavily focusing on social commerce. Prior studies have analyzed impact of trust and culture on social commerce, design and interface aspects of it, and intention to use social commerce by general people. Our study is informed by the literature on information disclosure intention, and Communication Privacy Management theory and is motivated by the fundamental premise that intention to self-disclose in social commerce is affected by perceived ownership of information, privacy apathy, the risks and benefits of disclosure and fairness of information exchange. We analyzed data collected from 252 samples using the scenario method. The results show that shoppers’ information disclosure intention is driven by the fairness of information exchange, privacy benefits and privacy apathy.     

Perceived quality factors of location-based apps on trust,perceived privacy risk,and continuous usage intention

Numerous location-based services (LBS) studies have suggested that the risk of disclosing personal privacy hinders consumers from adopting LBS, whereas scant attention has focused on clarifying how to mitigate the perceived privacy risk of using LBS. This quantitative study focuses on the effects of consumer quality perceptions (i.e. information quality, system quality, and service quality) on their trust in LBS, which consequently affects perceived privacy risk and continued usage intention towards LBS. Research data were collected through a market survey website; 1399 valid questionnaires were collected. Structural equation modelling analysis was applied to the data. The results revealed that information quality, system quality, and service quality were positively related to perceived trust. Perceived trust also correlated negatively with perceived privacy risk, but positively with continued usage intention. A managerial implication drawn from the findings is that LBS providers should develop more useful user interfaces or provide timely, personalised services to reduce perceived privacy risk and strengthen LBS continued usage intention.     

Internet social network communities: Risk taking,trust, and privacy concerns

Individuals communicate and form relationships through Internet social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace. We study risk taking, trust, and privacy concerns with regard to social networking websites among 205 college students using both reliable scales and behavior. Individuals with profiles on social networking websites have greater risk taking attitudes than those who do not; greater risk taking attitudes exist among men than women. Facebook has a greater sense of trust than MySpace. General privacy concerns and identity information disclosure concerns are of greater concern to women than men. Greater percentages of men than women display their phone numbers and home addresses on social networking websites. Social networking websites should inform potential users that risk taking and privacy concerns are potentially relevant and important concerns before individuals sign-up and create social networking websites.     

Information disclosure on mobile devices: Re-examining privacy calculus with actual user behavior

The use of mobile applications continues to experience exponential growth. Using mobile apps typically requires the disclosure of location data, which often accompanies requests for various other forms of private information. Existing research on information privacy has implied that consumers are willing to accept privacy risks for relatively negligible benefits, and the offerings of mobile apps based on location-based services (LBS) appear to be no different. However, until now, researchers have struggled to replicate realistic privacy risks within experimental methodologies designed to manipulate independent variables. Moreover, minimal research has successfully captured actual information disclosure over mobile devices based on realistic risk perceptions. The purpose of this study is to propose and test a more realistic experimental methodology designed to replicate real perceptions of privacy risk and capture the effects of actual information disclosure decisions. As with prior research, this study employs a theoretical lens based on privacy calculus. However, we draw more detailed and valid conclusions due to our use of improved methodological rigor. We report the results of a controlled experiment involving consumers (n=1025) in a range of ages, levels of education, and employment experience. Based on our methodology, we find that only a weak, albeit significant, relationship exists between information disclosure intentions and actual disclosure. In addition, this relationship is heavily moderated by the consumer practice of disclosing false data. We conclude by discussing the contributions of our methodology and the possibilities for extending it for additional mobile privacy research.