Privacy, control, and the use of information technology: The development, validation, and testing of the Privacy -Invasive Perceptions Scale

Advances in civilization and in technology cultivate new sensibilities and vulnerabilities toward invasions of privacy. Individuals are becoming privacy assertive: they ask to be removed from marketing databases, decline to register at e-commerce sites, and avoid using technology that evokes privacy-invasive perceptions.;While individual's concerns about privacy are well documented in the literature, research on the source of these concerns is limited. In particular, there is a scarcity of research in the IS field that focuses on the features of information technology that influence an individuals' IT-related privacy-invasive perceptions.;To fill the gap in the literature, this dissertation develops and validates an instrument that identifies and measures the extent to which information technology influences individuals' IT-related privacy-invasive perceptions. This newly created IT-related privacy-invasive perceptions (PIP) scale is then used to predict behavioral intention toward using information technology.;The results of this study indicate that privacy cannot easily be decomposed into distinct dimensions such as information management, organizational technology management and interaction management. This finding is supported by previous studies attempting to separate privacy into components, namely, the Concerns for Information Privacy (CFIP) scale measuring individuals' concerns about organizational information privacy practices. A marginally significant negative relationship exists between the PIP scale and Intent to use IT. This relationship was found to be almost totally mediated by an individual's desire for control: individuals with a high desire for control are more likely to use information technology irrespective of their IT-related privacy-invasive perceptions. The PIP construct is bested represented by a second-order model suggesting the presence of a general privacy factor.