Antecedents and outcomes of information privacy concerns in a peer context: An exploratory study

Academic studies typically view privacy threats as originating solely from organizations. With the rise of social media, such a view is incomplete because consumers increasingly face risks from peers’ misuse of data. In this paper, we study information privacy in the context of peer relationships on commercial social media sites. We develop a model that considers relationships between the constructs of privacy experiences, privacy awareness, trust, risk, and benefits and how those relationships impact individuals’ disclosure behaviors. We test the model by creating a survey that includes a number of measures that were taken directly from or were closely based on measures from prior studies. We conduct seven pilot tests of undergraduate students in order to validate the survey items. Working with the online survey firm Qualtrics, we gather a dataset of 314 Facebook users’ responses to our validated survey, and we test our model using partial least squares techniques. We find that both privacy experiences and privacy awareness are quite significant predictors of privacy concerns. We also find that trust, risk, benefits, and privacy concerns work together to explain a large amount (37%) of the variance in disclosure behaviors. We discuss implications for practice and for future research.