Emerging Applications on Smart Phones: The Role of Privacy Concerns and its Antecedents on Smart Phones Usage

Abstract

Many applications on smart Phones can use various sensors embedded in the mobiles to provide users’ private information. This can result in a variety of privacy issues that may lessening level of mobile apps usage. To understand this issue better the researcher identified the root causes of privacy concerns. The study proposed a model identifies the root causes of privacy concerns and perceived benefits based on our interpretation for information boundary theory. The proposed model also addresses the usage behavior and behavioral intention toward using mobile apps by using the Theory of Planned Behavior. The result shows that “Cultural values” alone explains 70% of “Perceived privacy concerns” followed by “Self-defense” which explains around 23% of “Perceived privacy concerns”, and then “Context of the situation” with 5%. Whereas, the findings show that “Perceived effectiveness of privacy policy” and “Perceived effectiveness of industry self-regulation” both are factors which have the ability to reduce individuals “Perceived privacy concerns” by 9% and 8% respectively.