Couldn't or Wouldn't? the Influence of Privacy Concerns and Self-Efficacy in Privacy Management on Privacy Protection

Sampling 515 college students, this study investigates how privacy protection, including profile visibility, self-disclosure, and friending, are influenced by privacy concerns and efficacy regarding one's own ability to manage privacy settings, a factor that researchers have yet to give a great deal of attention to in the context of social networking sites (SNSs). The results of this study indicate an inconsistency in adopting strategies to protect privacy, a disconnect from limiting profile visibility and friending to self-disclosure. More specifically, privacy concerns lead SNS users to limit their profile visibility and discourage them from expanding their network. However, they do not constrain self-disclosure. Similarly, while self-efficacy in privacy management encourages SNS users to limit their profile visibility, it facilitates self-disclosure. This suggests that if users are limiting their profile visibility and constraining their friending behaviors, it does not necessarily mean they will reduce self-disclosure on SNSs because these behaviors are predicted by different factors. In addition, the study finds an interaction effect between privacy concerns and self-efficacy in privacy management on friending. It points to the potential problem of increased risk-taking behaviors resulting from high self-efficacy in privacy management and low privacy concerns.Radio-Television-Fil

Innovative public governance through cloud computing: Information privacy, business models and performance measurement challenges

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze challenges and to discuss proposed solutions for innovative public governance through cloud computing. Innovative technologies, such as federation of services and cloud computing, can greatly contribute to the provision of e-government services, through scaleable and flexible systems. Furthermore, they can facilitate in reducing costs and overcoming public information segmentation. Nonetheless, when public agencies use these technologies, they encounter several associated organizational and technical changes, as well as significant challenges. Design/methodology/approach: We followed a multidisciplinary perspective (social, behavioral, business and technical) and conducted a conceptual analysis for analyzing the associated challenges. We conducted focus group interviews in two countries for evaluating the performance models that resulted from the conceptual analysis. Findings: This study identifies and analyzes several challenges that may emerge while adopting innovative technologies for public governance and e-government services. Furthermore, it presents suggested solutions deriving from the experience of designing a related platform for public governance, including issues of privacy requirements, proposed business models and key performance indicators for public services on cloud computing. Research limitations/implications: The challenges and solutions discussed are based on the experience gained by designing one platform. However, we rely on issues and challenges collected from four countries. Practical implications: The identification of challenges for innovative design of e-government services through a central portal in Europe and using service federation is expected to inform practitioners in different roles about significant changes across multiple levels that are implied and may accelerate the challenges' resolution. Originality/value: This is the first study that discusses from multiple perspectives and through empirical investigation the challenges to realize public governance through innovative technologies. The results emerge from an actual portal that will function at a European level. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Public preferences for internet surveillance, data retention and privacy enhancing services: evidence from a pan-European study

This paper examines public preferences regarding privacy implications of internet surveillance. The study was based on a pan-European survey and included a stated preference discrete choice experiment (SPDCE) involving the choice of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) offering varying levels of storage, access and sharing of internet activity, continuous surveillance and privacy enhancing technologies. The survey obtained 16,463 individual responses across the European Union's 27 member-states1. Respondents expressed highest levels of concern about: Internet facilitated crime, namely using the internet to share and publish child pornography (68.2%); individual data protection and security threats – i.e., personal information not being handled in a legitimate way (62%); computer viruses (61.4%) and finally the theft of financial data or identity (61.4%). Such levels of concern affect trust in the Internet: 27.7% of respondents trusted websites for information exchange and a similar figure, 30.7% reported they trust websites for business transactions. Given this context, following our analysis of preferences, on average, respondents were more likely to choose an ISP that would not store any internet activity, would retain any data for up to 1 month and would not share data with anyone else. Interestingly, respondents did recognise the potential benefit for continuous state-surveillance (by the police), but only under an appropriate accountable legal basis. Also, respondents were in favour of an array of privacy enhancing technologies that would enhance their privacy when using the Internet. Finally, the analysis shows that in some cases, significant differences in preferences across countries and socio-economic characteristics suggest that individual privacy-preferences do vary across cultural/national settings, age, gender and education level

Extending the generalizability and pragmatic contributions to solve privacy paradox

Privacy issue has increasingly become an integral part of organizations and businesses that operate within the digital era. However, heretofore, there is a lack of a systematic literature review to help scholars to integrate what has been done in previous studies when privacy issues were addressed especially the privacy paradox that still perplexes both academia and practitioners alike. Furthermore, with the inconsistency of findings regarding the privacy paradox, there is also a need to support researchers in recognizing the substantial constructs to improve the results of their empirical papers. Therefore, this paper aims to serve as an integrated review to congregate constructs that can help scholars to improve the generalizability and pragmatic contributions when addressing privacy paradox issue. Besides the conclusion that there is a lack of empirical papers on privacy paradox published in the business, management and marketing journal publications, we also synthesize constructs such as the population of the study, methodology, cross-cultural aspect and context of the study to improve the extent of the generalizability and practical contributions of empirical paper related to the privacy paradox. The limitations and implications of this study are also discussed at the end of this paper

Privacy as a Tradeoff: Introducing the Notion of Privacy Calculus for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

Evidences collected from smartphones users show a growing desire of personalization offered by services for mobile devices. However, the need to accurately identify users' contexts has important implications for user's privacy and it increases the amount of trust, which users are requested to have in the service providers. In this paper, we introduce a model that describes the role of personalization and control in users' assessment of cost and benefits associated to the disclosure of private information. We present an instantiation of such model, a context-aware application for smartphones based on the Android operating system, in which users' private information are protected. Focus group interviews were conducted to examine users' privacy concerns before and after having used our application. Obtained results confirm the utility of our artifact and provide support to our theoretical model, which extends previous literature on privacy calculus and user's acceptance of context-aware technology

Communicating Personal Health Information in Virtual Health Communities: An Integration of Privacy Calculus Model and Affective Commitment

Health consumers such as patients and caregivers often join virtual health communities (VHCs) to seek and provide health-related information and emotional support. To do so, they converse with other individuals in platforms such as public discussion boards and blogs. During these online conversations, people may communicate their personal health information (PHI) to others. A potential driver for this form of revealing PHI is the immediate positive outcomes that it can provide for contributors and the community. PHI disclosure, however, can entail privacy risks and concerns for community members, which may ultimately hamper their participation in those communities. Moreover, one’s emotional attachment to a VHC (namely, affective commitment) may influence one’s PHI sharing behaviors in that community. Thus, to understand how various factors impact communicating PHI in public VHC discussions, we drew on the privacy calculus model and the notion of affective commitment, developed a theoretical model, and empirically tested the model. To do so, we administered a survey to individuals from three different populations including students, faculty, and staff at a large university and visitors to clinics. We performed a set of hierarchical moderated multiple regressions on the dataset. The results revealed that privacy concerns along with expected personal and community-related outcomes of communicating PHI affected willingness to communicate PHI in public VHC discussions. The results, however, refuted the hypothesized direct and moderating effects of affective commitment on willingness to share PHI in these virtual platforms. The findings of this study provide contributions to research and practice

Examining the Formation of Individual\u27s Privacy Concerns: Toward an Integrative View

Numerous public opinion polls reveal that individuals are quite concerned about threats to their information privacy. However, the current understanding of privacy that emerges is fragmented and usually discipline-dependent. A systematic understanding of individuals’ privacy concerns is of increasing importance as information technologies increasingly expand the ability for organizations to store, process, and exploit personal data. Drawing on information boundary theory, we developed an integrative model suggesting that privacy concerns form because of an individual’s disposition to privacy or situational cues that enable one person to assess the consequences of information disclosure. Furthermore, a cognitive process, comprising perceived privacy risk, privacy control and privacy intrusion is proposed to shape an individual’s privacy concerns toward a specific Web site’s privacy practices. We empirically tested the research model through a survey (n=823) that was administered to users of four different types of web sites: 1) electronic commerce sites, 2) social networking sites, 3) financial sites, and 4) healthcare sites. The study reported here is novel to the extent that existing empirical research has not examined this complex set of privacy issues. Implications for theory and practice are discussed, and suggestions for future research along the directions of this study are provided

Thinking Styles and Privacy Decisions: Need for Cognition, Faith into Intuition, and the Privacy Calculus

Investigating cognitive processes that underlie privacy-related decisions, prior research has primarily adopted a privacy calculus view, indicating privacy-related decisions to constitute rational anticipations of risks and benefits connected to data disclosure. Referring to psychological limitations and heuristic thinking, however, recent research has discussed notions of bounded rationality in this context. Adopting this view, the current research argues that privacy decisions are guided by thinking styles, i.e. individual preferences to decide in an either rational or intuitive way. Results of a survey indicated that individuals high in rational thinking, as reflected by a high need for cognition, anticipated and weighed risk and benefits more thoroughly. In contrast, individuals relying on experiential thinking (as reflected by a high faith into intuition) overleaped rational considerations and relied on their hunches rather than a privacy calculus when assessing intentions to disclose information. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed

An Open Model for Researching the Role of Culture in Online Self-Disclosure

The analysis of consumers’ personal information (PI) is a significant source to learn about consumers. In online settings, many consumers disclose PI abundantly - this is particularly true for information provided on social network services. Still, people manage the privacy level they want to maintain by disclosing by disclosing PI accordingly. In addition, studies have shown that consumers’ online self-disclosure (OSD) differs across cultures. Therefore, intelligent systems should consider cultural issues when collecting, processing, storing or protecting data from consumers. However, existing studies typically rely on a comparison of two cultures, providing valuable insights but not drawing a comprehensive picture. We introduce an open research model for cultural OSD research, based on the privacy calculus theory. Our open research model incorporates six cultural dimensions, six predictors, and 24 structured propositions. It represents a comprehensive approach that provides a basis to explain possible cultural OSD phenomena in a systematic way