A cross-country examination of online privacy issues: From an adversarial paradigm toward a situational paradigm. A comparison of regulations, net users' concerns and practices, and Web sites' privacy statements in China, the Netherlands, Taiwan, and th

The purpose of this dissertation was first to falsify the common assumptions of the privacy research from an adversarial paradigm, which does not work in the Internet settings. The assumptions usually imply that net users who have higher privacy concerns will disclose less information and that data subjects are adversarial to data users, which makes net users not to give away their information. However, those assumptions cannot explain why some net users are willing to trade off their information with some rewards and why some net users tend to give away their information to specific web sites. This study proved that net users' privacy concerns do not reflect on their privacy practices. Although net users claim that they are concerned a lot about their privacy, they still disclose large amount of information on the Internet. Moreover, this dissertation proved that privacy is dynamic rather than static. The same individual might have different privacy concerns and privacy practices in different situations. Privacy infringement is not always dangerous and people are not always hurt by some infringement. There is degree difference. In addition, there is no type of information always sensitive. It depends on the contexts.; The current privacy research only focuses on users' demographics and merely research what kind of person would disclose more information. Therefore, this dissertation then proved that social contexts account for more users' privacy concerns and privacy practices. This study found that country difference, web site category, web sites' data collection condition and government involvement in data protection explain more variance of users' privacy practices than demographics. Respondents from China, the Netherlands, Taiwan and the United States perceive web site categories so differently, which implies the influences of political systems, cultural background and economic development.; The results contributed to policy-making and social representatives theory. For theoretical implications, cognition (privacy concerns) and action (privacy practices) are both very important to understand social representations (privacy). Action is not only researched by qualitative method as discursive psychology suggested but also by quantitative method. It sheds some light on social representations theory and discursive psychology. For policy implications, given that web sites do not provide profound privacy protection and technology is changing, this study suggests that government regulation and self-regulation have to work together. Government regulation provides basic protection and self-regulation establishes detailed guideline according to web site categories and technology. In addition, due to carelessness of net users, it is necessary to promote privacy education to net users. They have to be responsible for their practices to prevent data abuse.; Finally, this study upholds that the future privacy research should take contexts or situations into account from the common-used adversarial privacy research paradigm toward a situational paradigm. The researchers have to find more social contexts which are essential to users' privacy concerns and practices as well as study what makes users to disclose their information to create a non-abuse-information environment on the Internet.