Abstract
We analyze the relationships between country culture and country regulatory structure pertaining to information privacy concerns (IPC) in the context of social media applications. Drawing on prior research we develop a framework that integrates country culture and country regulatory structure and use it as the basis for a study that contrasts samples of 1086 professionals drawn from four countries – United States, United Kingdoms, India and Hong Kong – to assess effects of national culture and of a nation’s regulatory structure on IPC, attitudinal beliefs about information privacy and professionals’ behavioral reactions to IPC. We find that country culture has a strong bearing on explaining differences in individuals’ IPC concerns, attitudinal beliefs about privacy, and behavioral reactions to privacy much more than does country regulatory structure. Country culture remains a significant factor in the management of information privacy. The results also show that country regulatory structure remains deficient in allaying individuals’ concerns pertaining to information privacy.
Highlights
Information privacy remains a significant issue for most individuals and organizations in the emergent data-economy (Chen, 2013; Dinev, 2014; Edwards, Hofmeyr and Forrest, 2016)
Concerning differential effects of regulatory structure’s impacts on the study’s dependent constructs, we found no significant differences in the means of the two regulatory structure groups across all of the six first-order dimensions of information privacy concerns (IPC), namely collection, secondary use, errors in data, unauthorized access to data, control and awareness
Given that we find country culture to be such a significant predictor of individuals IPC; their attitudinal beliefs about information privacy within the context of information technology applications, and; their intentions to use information technology applications, it may be that universal regulations designed to regulate information privacy across multiple different countries, such as the recently implemented General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), may have limitations in their efficacy to provide intended or sought after protections, especially where member-countries exhibit significant country-culture differences
Summary
Information privacy remains a significant issue for most individuals and organizations in the emergent data-economy (Chen, 2013; Dinev, 2014; Edwards, Hofmeyr and Forrest, 2016). The maturing of always-connected communications devices continues to contribute to the reported increase in privacy concerns (Yeung, Balebako, Gutierrez & Chaykowsky, 2020; Kantarcioglu & Ferrari, 2019; Georgiadou & Kounadi, 2019; Jensen & Wagner, 2018), especially given the expanding ability of such applications to ubiquitously collect disparate types of an individual’s data (Brennan & Lovells, 2016; Choi, Jiang, Xiao, & Kim, 2015; Choi, Wu, Yu & Land, 2018). Perpetually accessing, collecting and transmitting vast amounts of individual users’ personal information to extant parties (Lin and Armstrong, 2019; Georgiadou et al, 2019; Turgut et al, 2017; Guo et al, 2008; Lowry et al, 2011). Protection of privacy and the mitigation of bias and future risks to individuals brought about by privacy breaches extend to more recent and emergent technologies such as facial recognition technologies (Yeung, et al, 2020), the Internet of Things (Turgut et al, 2017) and self-driving vehicles (Mladenović, et al, 2020)
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