Antecedents and outcomes of information privacy concerns in a peer context: An exploratory study

Abstract

Academic studies typically view privacy threats as originating solely from organizations. With the rise of social media, such a view is incomplete because consumers increasingly face risks from peers’ misuse of data. In this paper, we study information privacy in the context of peer relationships on commercial social media sites. We develop a model that considers relationships between the constructs of privacy experiences, privacy awareness, trust, risk, and benefits and how those relationships impact individuals’ disclosure behaviors. We test the model by creating a survey that includes a number of measures that were taken directly from or were closely based on measures from prior studies. We conduct seven pilot tests of undergraduate students in order to validate the survey items. Working with the online survey firm Qualtrics, we gather a dataset of 314 Facebook users’ responses to our validated survey, and we test our model using partial least squares techniques. We find that both privacy experiences and privacy awareness are quite significant predictors of privacy concerns. We also find that trust, risk, benefits, and privacy concerns work together to explain a large amount (37%) of the variance in disclosure behaviors. We discuss implications for practice and for future research.

Keywords:

• privacy concerns
• peer
• behavioral outcomes
• disclosure

Special Issue Editors: Paul Benjamin Lowry, Tamara Dinev, Robert Willison

Special Issue Editors: Paul Benjamin Lowry, Tamara Dinev, Robert Willison

Notes

1 See https://www.facebook.com/help/247746261926036. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

2 See Smith et al (2011) for a review.

3 This second-order viewing is often possible when a user’s friend comments on his or her post. The friend’s friends are then able to see not only the comment but also the original post.

4 Three articles addressing corporate privacy policies and/or compliance therewith were also identified in this search: Greenaway et al (2015), Wall et al (2016) and Warkentin et al (2011). These are not included in the table.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zafer D. Ozdemir

Zafer D. Ozdemir is a Professor at the Farmer School of Business, Miami University. His research focuses on economics of e-commerce and has appeared in scholarly journals such as Information Systems Research, Journal of MIS, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, Information & Management, and Communications of the ACM, among others.

H. Jeff Smith

H. Jeff Smith is the George and Mildred Panuska Professor in Business in the Farmer School of Business at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His research focuses on ethical, societal, and regulatory issues associated with strategic uses of information technology. His research has appeared in many highly ranked journals.

John H. Benamati

John H. Benamati is a Professor of Information Systems and Chair of the Information Systems and Analytics Department at the Farmer School of Business, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA. His major research and teaching interests are e-commerce trust, changing IT, information privacy, and IT management/strategy.