A Study On The Factors Influencing On Privacy Policies Reading Intention Of E-Commerce APPs

With the booming of digital economy and mobile communication technology,people’s lives have become increasingly inseparable from e-commerce APPs,which can meet various needs such as shopping,office and entertainment,and provide services that require the collection of various personal information such as fingerprints,location,pictures and recordings of users.However,the problem of ecommerce APPs collecting personal information without the user’s consent,to an excessive extent and too frequently is very serious and can easily lead to the leakage of the user’s personal information and the loss of the user’s personal property.Privacy policy is the personal information protection rules informed by the enterprise to the user,mainly contains the user’s information rights,how the enterprise handles personal information,how the enterprise protects the security of the user’s personal information,etc.Its development and improvement is the most basic part of the protection of user privacy security.However,the privacy policies of many e-commerce APPs are not standardised,making the privacy policy ineffective in safeguarding the security of user information,while the regulatory power of the state is limited.Therefore,users are required to read the privacy policy in order to achieve external supervision of the normality,reasonableness and transparency of the privacy policy and to effectively play the role of the privacy policy.In addition,users’ reading of privacy policies can also play a significant role in the development of enterprises themselves.Users’ reading of privacy policies can significantly increase their willingness to disclose their personal information,and enterprises can improve their services and identify new business opportunities by legally using the personal data provided by users.However,due to the length of privacy policies and the amount of jargon involved,few users read them.Therefore,this study selects six external variables: subjective norms,experience,self-efficacy,information overload,information quality and information legibility,from three perspectives: the user’s environment,the user’s own characteristics and the characteristics of the privacy policy itself,to investigate how each external variable stimulates the user’s perceived usefulness,perceived ease of use and perceived risk avoidance,and thus influences the e-commerce app user’s privacy policies reading intention.Firstly,we summarise the research results at home and abroad,construct a model of factors influencing the reading intention of e-commerce APP privacy policy based on the TAM model and put forward the research hypothesis.Then,by drawing on mature scales at home and abroad,data were collected and analysed to test whether the hypotheses were valid.The results show that:(1)subjective norms and experience have a positive influence on perceived risk aversion;(2)experience,self-efficacy,information quality and information legibility have a positive influence on perceived ease of use,and information overload negatively influences perceived ease of use;(3)subjective norms,information quality and perceived risk aversion have a positive influence on perceived usefulness;(4)perceived risk aversion,perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness all positively influence reading intention.Based on the results of the hypothesis testing,it was found that information quality and information accessibility could positively influence users’ perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of the privacy policy,which in turn influenced reading intentions.Based on this,this study analyses the privacy policy content of 18 e-commerce APPs,and the results show that:(1)there is much room for improvement in the privacy policy in terms of information quality,information legibility and default settings for the presentation;(2)more attention needs to be paid to the privacy policy of tail ecommerce APPs with a relatively small number of users.Based on the above research content,this study proposes recommendations for e-commerce APP operators to improve the quality of privacy policy information,improve the legibility of privacy policy information and improve the setting of privacy policy reading reminders,for e-commerce APP users to read more privacy policies and read carefully the privacy policies of tail APPs,and for government authorities to use new technologies to strengthen supervision,enhance supervision of tail APPs,improve relevant laws and regulations and increase publicity on personal information security.