What drives internet users’ willingness to provide personal information?
| Date | 08 October 2018 |
| Pages | 923-939 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-09-2016-0264 |
| Published date | 08 October 2018 |
| Author | Ching-Hsuan Yeh,Yi-Shun Wang,Shin-Jeng Lin,Timmy H. Tseng,Hsin-Hui Lin,Ying-Wei Shih,Yi-Hsuan Lai |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management |
What drives internet users’
willingness to provide
personal information?
Ching-Hsuan Yeh and Yi-Shun Wang
Department of Information Management,
National Changhua University of Education, Changhua, Taiwan
Shin-Jeng Lin
Department of Management, Leadership and Information Systems,
Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York, USA
Timmy H. Tseng
Department of Information Management,
National Changhua University of Education, Changhua, Taiwan
Hsin-Hui Lin
National Taichung University of Science and Technology, Taichung, Taiwan, and
Ying-Wei Shih and Yi-Hsuan Lai
Department of Information Management,
National Changhua University of Education, Changhua, Taiwan
Abstract
Purpose –Considering that users’information privacy concerns may affect the development of e-commerce,
the purpose of this paper is to explore what drives internet users’willingness to provide personal information;
further, the paper examines how extrinsic rewards moderate the relationship between users’information
privacy concerns and willingness to provide personal information.
Design/methodology/approach –Data collected from 345 valid internet users in the context of electronic
commerce were analyzed using the partial least squares approach.
Findings –The result showed that agreeableness, risk-taking propensity and experience of privacy invasion
were three main antecedents of information privacy concerns among the seven individual factors.
Additionally, information privacy concerns did not significantly affect users’willingness to provide personal
information in the privacy calculation mechanism; however, extrinsic rewards directly affected users’
disclosure intention. The authors found that extrinsic rewards had not moderated the relationship between
users’information privacy concerns and their willingness to provide personal information.
Originality/value –This study is an exploratory effort to develop and validate a model for explaining why
internet users were willing to provide personal information. The results of this study are helpful to
researchers in developing theories of information privacy concerns and to practitioners in promoting internet
users’willingness to provide personal information in an e-commerce context.
Keywords Big Five personality, Experience of privacy invaded, Extrinsic rewards,
Information privacy concern, Risk-taking propensity, Willingness to provide personal information
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
It has been a common practice for internet users to provide their personal information in
exchange for website services access. Users become registered members and are allowed to
use a website’s services that are either personalized (system-tailored) or customized
(user-tailored) by offering limited or detailed demographics or personal preference
information, limited (Sundar and Marathe, 2010). While users may continue to enjoy
excellent website services, information privacy concerns are increasingly at stake (Liu et al.,
Online Information Review
Vol. 42 No. 6, 2018
pp. 923-939
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-09-2016-0264
Received 14 September 2016
Revised 7 May 2017
1 August 2017
Accepted 27 October 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
923
What drives
willingness
to provide
information?
2004). Information privacy concerns arise when a user subjectively perceives a threat
resulting from his/her personal information being intruded upon in one or more of the
following ways: improper access, unpermitted collection, unauthorized secondary use and
incorrect capture (Smith et al., 1996).
After an interdisciplinary review of literature on privacy concerns, Smith et al. (2011,
p. 989) proposed the antecedent–privacy concerns–outcome (APCO) model. Application
of the APCO model revealed that once users perceive that their privacy is likely invaded,
they might be unwilling to share their personal information with websites. However, this
negative relationship may not always hold true; users may actually disclose personal
information despite their privacy concerns (Lee and Cranage, 2011). Such a phenomenon
is known as the privacy paradox (Norberg et al., 2007). The privacy paradox is relevant
to the web environment because an increasing number of websites, such as Amazon,
invite users to provide personal information and enjoy personalized services
(Garfinkel et al., 2008). Researchers explained this paradoxical phenomenon with the
privacy calculus theory: extrinsic benefits or rewards such as price discounts should
additionally be taken into an account in reaching the decision to provide personal
information (Wang and Wu, 2014). Likewise, privacy disclosure behavior is the function
of privacy benefits and privacy costs (Dinev et al., 2008). Recent studies have proposed
that different levels of information processing (i.e. central or peripheral) exist when
users perform privacy calculus (Angst and Agarwal, 2009). When users perform central
information processing, they are likely to focus on the interaction of benefits and costs;
in contrast, when users perform peripheral information processing, they may only
consider the main effects of benefits and costs or one of them. However, few studies have
examined privacy calculus mechanisms while considering different levels of information
processing. Hence, the first objective of this research is to examine whether privacy
benefits and privacy concerns facilitate the intention to disclose personal information
independently or interactively.
Moreover, a varie ty of factors (i.e. individual, institutional and cultural) have b een
found as the antecedents of privacy concerns (Li, 2014; Smith et al., 2011). Of these factors,
individual factors, such as personality, are mostly examined but have inconclusive results
(Smith et al., 2011). It has been suggested that more research is needed to clarify and better
understand the exiting contradiction (Li, 2014, p. 348). Furthermore, personality traits
were indicated by Li (2012) as antecedents to all other personal beliefs. Hence, the second
objective of this research is to investigate the relationships between individual factors and
privacy concerns. Specifically, general personality (i.e. Big Five typology) and risk-related
factors (i.e. risk-taking propensity and experience of privacy invasion) are considered for
individual differences.
Li (2012) proposed an integrated theoretical framework of online information privacy
concerns. The framework is a useful guide to research because it is developed based on a
comprehensivereview of theories in the area of onlineinformation privacy and in the website
context (Li, 2012). Furthermore, a portion of the framework includes theories concerning the
individualfactors and the privacy calculusof online information privacyconcerns. This study
chooses a portion of Li’s (2012) framework to develop the research model for the following
reasons. First, since the aim of this study is to examine theprivacy calculus mechanism with
empirical evidence on how privacy concerns are determined by individual factors, the
individual factors and privacy calculus parts of Li’s (2012) framework are consistent to the
objectives of current research. Second, although both individual factors and privacy calculus
have been widely examined in the past studies, the inconsistent results of past studies
regarding theeffects of individual factorson privacy concerns and the complexpsychological
process concerning privacy calculus make these two parts of Li’s (2012) framework worth
further investigation (Angst and Agarwal, 2009; Li, 2012; Smith et al., 2011).
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