Research On The Impact Of E-commerce Platform Privacy Policy On Users’ Privacy Self-disclosure Intention

With the development of e-commerce,people are exposed to the network environment for a longer time.Everyone’s online action track and the information provided when registering an account are recorded into personal data.E-commerce websites can use these data to optimize their services and bring convenience to consumers.While consumers enjoy convenience,they will also face the risk of privacy disclosure.Especially in recent years,the frequent occurrence of privacy disclosure events makes consumers pay more and more attention to privacy and security issues and are unwilling to provide personal information,which restricts the rapid development of e-commerce.According to previous studies,China’s e-commerce enterprises generally inform consumers of their use and protection of information by publishing privacy policies to consumers.Therefore,this paper aims to analyze the impact of privacy policy on consumers’ willingness to disclose privacy,and put forward based and effective suggestions on how e-commerce websites promote consumers to be more willing to provide personal information.Firstly,this study combs the past research on privacy policy,privacy disclosure intention,privacy concern and consumer trust,divides the privacy policy into three aspects:understanding,authority level and perceived effectiveness,and introduces information sensitivity.Then,based on APCO macro model and communication privacy management theory,this paper constructs the research model and proposes research hypotheses.Through PLS-SEM method,394 valid questionnaires were tested and analyzed,and the mediating effect of privacy concern and trust and the moderating effect of information sensitivity were further investigated.The main conclusions are as follows:first,except that authority level has no significant impact on privacy concern,the path from privacy policy to privacy concern and from privacy policy to trust is significant;second,the path between privacy concern,trust to privacy disclosure intention and privacy concern to trust is significant;third,the path from privacy policy to privacy disclosure intention is not significant;fourth,except that there is no mediating effect between the authority level of privacy policy and users’willingness to disclose privacy,privacy concern and trust have mediating effect between privacy policy and users’ privacy disclosure intention;fifth,information sensitivity positively regulates the impact of privacy policy authority level on users’ privacy concerns,information sensitivity does not regulate the relationship between privacy policy authority level and trust.Combined with the conclusions of empirical analysis,this study puts forward five suggestions to improve consumers’ willingness to disclose privacy:first,improve the content of privacy policy from the perspective of consumers;second,different privacy policies should be formulated according to the information sensitivity;third,reduce users’ privacy concern;fourth,enhance users’ trust in e-commerce websites;fifth,establish and improve the system of laws and regulations on Internet privacy.Finally,the limitations of this study are analyzed,and the future directions of research are forecasted.