Cultural differences in the effects of contextual factors and privacy concerns on users’ privacy decision on social networking sites

ABSTRACT

Many social network sites (SNSs) have become available around the world and users’ online social networks increasingly include contacts from different cultures. However, there is lack of investigation into the concrete cultural differences in the effects of contextual factors and privacy concerns on users’ privacy decisions on social network sites (SNSs). The goal of this paper is to understand how contextual factors and privacy concerns cast different impact on privacy decisions, such as friend request decisions, information disclosure and perceived risk, in different countries. We performed a quantitative study through a large-scale online survey across the US, Korea and China to model the relationships between contextual factors, privacy concerns and privacy decisions. We find that the contextual influence and focus of privacy concerns vary between the individualistic and collectivistic countries in our sample. We suggest that multinational SNS service providers should consider different contextual factors and focus of privacy concerns in different countries and customise privacy designs and friend recommendation algorithms in SNSs in different countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• privacy concern
• context
• information disclosure
• social network sites

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 WeChat Red Packet is a popular feature in WeChat that allows transfer of money as a gift.

2 Since the chi-square test is sensitive to sample size, we conducted the measurement invariance test on a random subset (N = 390) of our data.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation: [Grant Number SES-1423629, SES-1640527].