Internet Privacy Concerns Revisited: Oversight from Surveillance and Right To Be Forgotten as New Dimensions

Abstract

In the post-Snowden revelation era, concerns related to government surveillance and oversight have come to the forefront. The ability of the Internet to remember “everything” (or forget anything) also raises a privacy concern associated with the right to be forgotten (RTBF). In this paper, we examine the conceptualization of Internet privacy concerns (IPC) by extending Hong and Thong's (2013) model with the addition of two dimensions: oversight (i.e., due to surveillance) and the RTBF. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence for our proposed integrated conceptualization. Data were collected from Amazon's Mechanical Turk and analyzed with structural equation modeling using a nomological network that includes trusting beliefs. This research contributes to a better understanding of the conceptualization of IPC and provides a reliable and valid contemporary instrument for IPC.