Antecedents And Consequences Of Privacy Concerns And Social Rewardsin Social Network Service: Evidence From China

Social network services(SNS) focus on building online communities of people who share interests and /or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. However, the community growth often faces with the barrier of privacy concerns. Therefore, this study examines antecedents and consequences of privacy concerns and social rewards with regard to social networking service websites among users using both reliable scales and measures in China. We searched for extensive literature and found four antecedents, i.e. perceived anonymity of self, peer influence, perceived level of control and perceived service quality, and considered three SNS beh avior; SNS continuance intention,intention to decrease the use, Alternate Behavior of Privacy Protection. Our results show that(1) higher perceived anonymity of self reduces privacy concerns,(2) higher peer influence increases social rewards,(3) higher perceived level of control increases privacy concerns,(4) higher perceived level of control increases social rewards,(5) higher the service quality increases social rewards,(6) greater privacy concern leads to more intention to decrease the use,(7) greater privacy concern leads to more alternate behavior of privacy protection,(8) greater social reward leads to greater SNS continuance intention. Of our findings, one surprising result is that higher perceived level of control increase privacy concerns, different to common sense. The logic behind this interesting finding is that the control makes the SNS users more sensitive to the privacy, and thus can lead to higher intention to decrease the SNS. In addition, the privacy concern and social rewards take significant and important mediating roles on the impact of antecedents on SNS behaviors.