The role of privacy concerns in the sharing economy

ABSTRACT

Internet-mediated sharing is growing quickly. Millions of users around the world share personal services and possessions with others ‒ often complete strangers. Shared goods can amount to substantial financial and immaterial value. Despite this, little research has investigated privacy in the sharing economy. To fill this gap, we examine the sharing–privacy nexus by exploring the privacy threats associated with Internet-mediated sharing. Given the popularity of sharing services, users seem quite willing to share goods and services despite the compounded informational and physical privacy threats associated with such sharing. We develop and test a framework for analyzing the effect of privacy concerns on sharing that considers institutional and social privacy threats, trust and social-hedonic as well as monetary motives.

KEYWORDS:

• Sharing
• social media
• privacy
• privacy paradox
• privacy calculus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Christoph Lutz is assistant professor at the Nordic Centre for Internet & Society, BI Norwegian Business School (Oslo). His research interests include online participation, privacy, the sharing economy, social robots, and digital serendipity [email: [email protected]].

Christian Pieter Hoffmann is professor of communication management at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies, University of Leipzig. His research is focused on online participation, trust, self-disclosure, and privacy protection in social media [email: [email protected]].

Eliane Bucher is assistant professor at the Nordic Centre for Internet & Society, BI Norwegian Business School (Oslo). Her research focuses on online communication, social media, corporate communications and the transformation of possessions through new media [email: [email protected]].

Christian Fieseler is the director of the Nordic Centre for Internet and Society and professor at the Department of Communication and Culture, BI Norwegian Business School (Oslo). His current research is focused on the question how individuals and organizations adopt to the shift brought by new, social media, and how to design participative and inclusive spaces in this new media regime [email: [email protected]].

ORCID

Christoph Lutz http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4389-6006

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Norges Forskningsråd [grant number 247725/O70].