Privacy concerns and benefits in SaaS adoption by individual users

Abstract

Software-as-a-Service, a new model of accessing software, presents individual users with tremendous opportunities to work and live conveniently and efficiently. Existing research has put much focus on understanding SaaS potential and risks for organizations and not much effort has been invested in understanding individual users, despite their market significance. This study aims at closing this gap by analyzing the cognitive mechanism through which individual users trade off privacy against the benefits that SaaS offers and identify salient benefits that trigger such trade-off. Based on the Theory of Reasoned Action, the Privacy-Trust-Intention model and cost-benefit theories, we developed a research framework that capture the trade-off between benefits and privacy and further analyzed data collected from an online survey of SaaS users in Korea with 290 respondents. Our findings indicate that individual users' intention to use SaaS is negatively affected by privacy concerns and positively affected by overall perceived benefits in a relationship that is mediated by trust towards SaaS providers. Surprisingly, no direct, significant effect of privacy concerns on intention to use SaaS was found, whereas overall perceived benefits were found to have a direct effect on users' intention to adopt SaaS. We found convenience to be the most salient benefit that users expect from adopting SaaS. Our study contributes to existing research by developing and empirically verifying a benefits-versus-privacy framework in a rather neglected segment of SaaS consumers in previous research. The findings also guide SaaS providers in mitigating privacy concerns; while efforts to minimize privacy will enhance users' trust, it is of paramount importance to maximize salient benefits such as convenience that outweigh privacy concerns during users' decision making to adopt SaaS.

Factors Influencing the Continuance Use of Mobile Social Media: The effect of Privacy Concerns

“…Bansal et al, 2010;Gashami et al, 2015;Liu, Marchewka, Lu, & Yu, 2005). Privacy concern has also been seen to have indirect effects on behavioural intention through trust(Bansal et al, 2010; Gashami et al, 2015; Liu et al, 2005; Zhou, 2011a), perceived risk (Slyke, Shim, Johnson, & Jiang, 2006; Zhou & Li, 2014) and perceived usefulness (Kumar, Mohan, & Holowczak, 2008).…”

What Drives Authorization in Mobile Applications? A Perspective of Privacy Boundary Management

“…Dinev and Hart [52] argued that the decision-making process of personal privacy disclosure may be jointly determined by two opposing beliefs, namely, trust and privacy concern. Privacy concern represents a negative psychological state, and trust is a positive psychological state that affects the overall self-assessed state of perceived privacy [57].…”

Reconciliation of Privacy with Preventive Cybersecurity: The Bright Internet Approach

“…For instance, Cunningham (2012) reviewed the balance between global privacy and data security laws. This issue has been addressed in the context of specific technologies, such as cloud computing (Gashami et al 2016;Takabi et al 2010), ecommerce (Miyazaki and Fernandez 2000), Internet of things (IoT) (Martínez-Pérez et al 2015), medical information systems (Appari and Johnson 2010), pervasive computing (Campbell et al 2002), and smart grid systems (McDaniel and McLaughlin 2009). These studies suggest that technologies have many security and privacy vulnerabilities that need to be addressed when developers are designing the systems.…”