Privacy conditions changes’ effects on users’ choices and service providers’ incomes

Abstract

At the age of IoT devices and Big Data it is required to have legal agreements between service providers and service users. These contracts, known as Terms and Conditions and privacy policy, determine clearly duties, rights, roles and responsibilities of each party. However, studies have shown that the majority of service users do not read these documents. This study presents the importance of reading terms and conditions and how it can affect user's decisions on choosing services. And how refusing these terms can affect service providers incomes and force them to change their strategies. This study is made on 20 smartphone users with a time of use that goes from 3 to 20 hour per day. Results have shown that 98% of the participants did not read any agreement concerning their mobile applications. However, reading and understanding the terms and conditions and privacy policy agreements of their mobile applications has pushed many participants to change their decisions and adopt new strategies on how to use a service that can access to confidential data. Results have shown that this new behavior of service users have an important effect on service providers incomes. Where service providers income reaches its maximum when users do not have any information concerning the service; however, service providers utility starts to decrease when the quantity of information that users have on the service used starts to increase.