A Study on Exploring Existence of Privacy Paradox on Social Networks Sites from Dual Views of Privacy Calculus and Protection Motivation Theory: the Moderating Role of Cognitive Absorption

Information individuals disclose may easily be accessed and stored through many ways, such as coping, searching, transferring, falsifying, and misappropriating without them knowing. Privacy concerns are especially important on social network sites because these have become major communication tools today. Almost everyone has some experience of sharing personal information, locations, photos, likes, reviews, opinions, thoughts, status updates, friends’ information, and photos that have been tagged on social network sites. But all information available on social network sites is a precious resource for businesses and service providers, because it can support marketing, service customization, business strategies, and consumer behavior analysis. However, users still fail to adopt protection mechanisms, notify privacy police, or decrease their information disclosure behavior on social network sites, even if they know the potential privacy risk. Privacy paradox describes how individuals express concern about their privacy, but act in a contradictory way by disclosing an extensive amount of personal information. This phenomenon has been discussed and empirical verified in literatures. But there is no consentient results about the existence and causes of privacy paradox. Recently, some literatures try to discuss privacy issues from emotional and situational views, rather than based on rational and cognitive processes. Extended this research line of discussion of privacy paradox, we proposed three main streams for explanation of privacy paradox: (1) considering contextual factors for privacy calculus, including motivations of participating in social network sites and protecting privacy because cognitive process of privacy concern exists but varies by situation; (2) considering emotional factors during interaction processes because individuals may abandon their rational behaviors; (3) considering enhanced institutional protection mechanisms because it could provide a comfortable environment and let users have self-confidence on institutional privacy protection. Accordingly, we plan to figure out privacy paradox by applying perspectives of privacy calculus, protection motivation theory, cognitive absorption, and institutional protection mechanism. Protection motivation theory is better to assess perceived privacy risks, rather than only consider privacy calculus because literatures usually evaluate contextual-free privacy calculus. Cognitive absorption may reflect individuals’ status when interacting with others on social network sites. It is worth exploring individuals’ privacy protection and information disclosure behavior in such situations. We propose the importance of individual perceived control over privacy protection from themselves and institutional assistance during interaction. Institutional protection mechanism should to be explored in depth. We propose that institutional protection mechanism include not only privacy policy and terms of statement, but also procedures, instructions and self-determination of privacy settings, and consideration for users’ needs of privacy protection in advance. Moreover, we propose that privacy concern and self-disclosure are multi-facets, rather than unidimensional constructs discussed in literatures. We also consider the influence of information sensitivity because individuals usually determine to whom, when and how they disclose information by the variant level of information sensitivity. This study will conduct online surveys for data collection. We will propose theoretical and managerial implications based on results of data analysis.

Project ID:PB10507-1404
External Project ID:MOST105-2410-H182-005