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A Study On User’s Privacy Risk Perception And Self-disclosure In Social Network Sites (SNS)

Posted on:2016-11-12Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:C B ZouFull Text:PDF
GTID:2308330461967896Subject:Communication
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The use of new technology, and particularly the Internet, increasingly requires people to disclose personal information online for various reasons. In computer internet mediated communication, self-disclosure may serve to reduce uncertainty in an interaction. In addition to this increased need for disclosure, the development of ambient and ubiquitous technologies has raised the possibility that devices will communicate, or even broadcast, personal information without recourse to the user themselves (Bellotti and Sellen,1993). And, the ability to easily store information, and cross reference databases, raises the possibility of unwitting disclosure through information accrual. Perhaps not surprisingly, this has raised a number of privacy concerns, amongst consumers and privacy advocates alike. The Oxford Internet Institute survey found that 70% of UK Internet users agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that, "people who go on the Internet put their privacy at risk". However, the relationship between consumers’privacy concerns and actual behavior is neither straightforward, nor has any link been established incontrovertibly. There is evidence that although many Internet users express privacy-protectionist attitudes, this rarely translates to their actual behavior.For instance, Olson, Grudin and Horvitz (2005) note that, "people’s willingness to share depends on who they are sharing the information with".This highlights the importance of the relationship between the discloser and the recipient in determining disclosure behavior, including the trust we have in the other party to our information. Trust is critical in understanding when we choose to share personal information with others and when we choose secrecy. Within e-commerce, trust has been identified as a key factor in determining purchasing behavior:"if the web site does not lead the consumer to believe that the merchant is trustworthy, no purchase decision will result". Online privacy is often framed as a contributor to trust, rather than as an independent effect on online behavior. Recent studies show that the link between privacy concern and self-disclosure was mediated by trust. These findings would go some way towards explaining why privacy attitudes rarely predict actual behavior since any explanatory power of privacy concern would be mediated by trust. However, this interpretation of the nature of the relationship between privacy and trust is potentially problematic.In the present paper we examine the nature of the relationship between privacy, trust and a privacy-related behavior:self-disclosure. This study combined the methods of the interviews and questionnaires, college students and young workers as the main survey target population. While ensuring the number of questionnaires, pay more attention to the quality of the questionnaires to ensure the accuracy of survey results and effectiveness. Then analyze the effective data with the methods of descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis, regression analysis and ANOVA analysis, the main conclusions of this thesis are as follows.The final analysis conclusion would suggest that privacy has little or no direct effect on user’ self-disclosure behavior. In the case of privacy and trust, it may be that the effect of privacy on self-disclosure behavior is moderated by trust, such that in conditions of low trust privacy exerts an influence on self-disclosure behavior, while in high trust environments privacy has a negligible impact on users’self-disclosure behavior.
Keywords/Search Tags:privacy, self-disclosure, risk perception, trust
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