Abstract
Social networking services provide modern information technology structures to support building social relationships, a process that entails the disclosure of personal information, preferences and other individual-related data. Facebook, specifically, has been involved in multiple issues pertaining the unauthorized use of users’ private information. Surprisingly, users reacted contradictorily to these privacy violations, for example, decrease in users’ subscriptions in the US and steady increase around the world. In this study, we build and test a conceptual framework that explains this phenomenon through the lens of privacy control. We base our work in the two-process model of control (Rothbaum et al. 1982) to demonstrate the dual nature of privacy control, where it comes from and how it affects privacy concerns and protective intentions (e.g., distancing and exit). Through a survey of Facebook users, we found that secondary privacy control, a coping mechanism to overcome uncontrollability, explains why many users seem not to care about their privacy and use Facebook regardless of privacy breaches. Moreover, we discovered that privacy control is mostly secondary. Building on a thought-provoking research about privacy control (Xu et al. 2012) we delved into yet-unseen territory and provide future paths for research.
Recommended Citation
Cano Bejar, Arturo Heyner; Ray, Soumya; and Chan, Ka Leong, "Who Cares About Privacy? The Dual Nature of Privacy Control in Social Networking Services" (2019). DIGIT 2019 Proceedings. 13.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/digit2019/13
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