Locus of Control and Location Privacy: An Empirical Study in Singapore

Abstract

Privacy concerns are particularly salient for Location-Based Services (LBS), because LBS could potentially associate the lifestyle habits, behaviors, and movements with a consumer's personal identity. Drawing on psychological control literature, we conducted an experiment to test: i) whether the presence of privacy assurance approaches has a considerable influence on alleviating consumers' privacy concerns, and ii) whether such influence will be moderated by the individual difference variable - locus of control (LOC). Three different privacy assurance approaches were manipulated in the study, and their effects on consumers' privacy concerns were examined. Results demonstrate the importance of LOC in moderating the effects of privacy assurance approaches on alleviating consumers' privacy concerns. We believe that the marriage of the privacy and social psychology literature may provide a rich understanding of consumers' privacy reactions to LBS usage, and therefore benefit the privacy research in Information Systems (IS) discipline.

KEYWORDS:

• Information Privacy
• Locus of Control (LOC)
• Location-Based Services (LBS)
• and Individual Differences

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heng Xu

Heng Xu, holder of the endowed PNC Technologies Career Development Professorship, is an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at the Pennsylvania State University. She leads the Privacy Assurance Lab (PAL), an inter-disciplinary research group working on a diverse set of projects related to understanding and assuring information privacy. Her current research focus is on the interplay between social and technological issues associated with information privacy and security. Her research projects have been dealing with impacts of novel technologies on individuals' privacy perceptions, usable privacy and security, and design of privacy-enhancing technologies. Her Ph.D. dissertation on Privacy Considerations in the Location Based Services was a runner up for the 2006 ACM SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation Award Competition. She has published broadly in journals such as DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Electronic Markets, Information & Management, and Journal of Management Information Systems.