The difference between perception and behavior regarding personal information disclosure and its effect on the use of mobile applications

Abstract

Much of previous research suggests that increased benefit or threat perception will change intention to use mobile applications. Other perceptions such as increased awareness and perceived control also may affect to the intention to use mobile apps. This paper aims at encapsulating the main results of the survey and presenting preliminary results of the relationship between different level of perceptions and intention to use of mobile application. To do this, this paper conducts on survey in study 1 and the same constructed experiment in study 2. While study 1 reveals the relationship among various perceptions and intention to use mobile apps, we assume that users’ privacy perceptions formed previously may differ with the perception when they actually face a moment of installing or using a service which can be regarded as an actual behavior. The conceptualized model in study 1 is tested based on 1,328 survey observations collected from a professional research firm in Korea. To identify underlying cause-effect relationships between different perceptions and the intention to use apps, we adopt the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) methodology. The result shows the positive relationship in perceived threat and benefit of privacy sharing toward the intention to use mobile apps. In the study 2, we employed a 2 (iOS platform vs. Android platform) × 4 (Control, Threat, Benefit, and Awareness) between-subjects experimental design. To obtain the managerial implications from this research, the content of message and background was adopted from actual content and background provided in the iOS and Android platforms. The result indicates that whether the user read a message in the iOS platform or Android platform background, only the content of message affects the assessed intention to use the mobile apps. It should be noted that among other messages, only the message which indicates a threat to privacy results in a negative effect on the intention to use mobile apps which are different from study 1. Our finding underlines the gap between different perceptions which have been previously formed and perceptions formed in real time in certain specific situations. People think they will share privacy information more with apps when perceiving more benefit, threat and having increased awareness, however, when people actually install or use apps, they do not care whether apps provide beneficial perception or not, only if it does not threaten them by using their privacy information maliciously. Therefore, the managerial implication from these studies is that the current way of iOS and Android showing benefit message may not help to increase the intention to use apps in specific contexts.