Love at First Sight: The Interplay Between Privacy Dispositions and Privacy Calculus in Online Social Connectivity Management

Abstract

Privacy has become the key concern of many users when they are confronted with friend requests on online social networking websites. Nonetheless, users' responses to friend requests seem at times inconsistent with their concerns about potential privacy implications. They accept friend requests and expose their personal profiles to largely unfamiliar others even though they are aware of the risks involved. Drawing on impression formation theory and the privacy calculus perspective, this paper elucidates the intriguing roles of privacy risks and expected social capital gains in social connectivity management by examining the key types of social information that users consider and their behavioral responses to online friend requests. We conducted a scenariobased experiment with 141 subjects. Our results indicate that individuals utilize two key types of social information; namely, network mutuality and profile diagnosticity in evaluating privacy risks and expected social capital gains. In addition, we find that privacy risks and expected social capital gains powerfully predict the likelihood of no-action and the likelihood of accepting friend requests on online social networking websites. In sum, this study contributes to the information systems literature by integrating impression formation theory and the privacy calculus perspective to identify the key types of social information that influence privacy tradeoff and predict individuals' behavioral responses toward establishing new online social connections.

Flamingos on a slackline: Companies' challenges of balancing the competing demands of handling customer information and privacy

“…More specifically, privacy calculus theory, a prevalent consumer‐centric theory of information privacy, offers a rationale for why these tensions exist. This theory suggests that customers weigh the benefits and risks of disclosing information to a service and therefore explains why customers might be scared away due to increased perceptions of risk if they are required to consent to additional data collection or use (eg, Choi, Wu, Yu, & Land, ; Kehr, Kowatsch, Wentzel, & Fleisch, ; Kordzadeh & Warren, ; Ozdemir, Smith, & Benamati, ). However, because of its consumer‐centric perspective, this theory does not consider companies' own information needs and therefore lacks a more detailed perspective on the resulting tensions for companies that offer services to their customers.…”

Revisiting APCO

“…Since the appearance of the APCO model and its enhanced version, numerous researchers have taken up this call for research and expanded privacy research in various directions. Due to the large contextual and situational dependence of privacy decisions, numerous approaches have been integrated into privacy research such as social cognitive theory [44], gratification theory [45], information boundary theory [45,46], impression formation theory [47], social identity theory [48], direct causation theory and affect heuristic theory [41], and the theory of psychological ownership [49].…”

Laziness as an explanation for the privacy paradox: a longitudinal empirical investigation

“…We define privacy concerns as an individual's perception that the privacy of personal information disclosed online is threatened (Son and Kim, 2008). This is slightly different from privacy risks, which can be defined as "the expectation of losses associated with the disclosure of personal information" (Xu et al, 2011, p. 804) and is often used to research privacy issues in the domain of IS (Choi et al, 2018;Zhan and Zhou, 2018). Hence, whereas privacy concerns are about how the information is used and who has access to the information (Dinev and Hart, 2006), privacy risks are about others' possible opportunistic behavior.…”