Understanding user misrepresentation behavior on social apps: The perspective of privacy calculus theory

Abstract

Due to the rapid growth of social media and mobile devices, social apps have become deeply integrated into people's lives. Extensive adoption of social apps entails the collection of massive amounts of users' private information, causing serious privacy issues. To protect their privacy, in practice, social app users are quite likely to disclose false information (i.e., to engage in misrepresentation behavior). Although misrepresentation behavior both influences the regular involvement of fellow users and reduces the efficiency of the marketing strategies designed by the social app operator, this phenomenon has received limited attention from academics. Accordingly, we use privacy calculus theory to investigate user misrepresentation behavior in the context of social apps. Our empirical analysis shows that both privacy concerns and social rewards motivate users to engage in misrepresentation behavior, while personalized benefits discourage users from doing so. We verify the interdependence of privacy concerns and perceived benefits by confirming that users with a high degree of privacy concerns tend to discount the perceived benefits of information disclosure. Moreover, we find that, as antecedents, perceived privacy control and app permission sensitivity influence privacy concerns significantly, while disposition to value privacy and perceived effectiveness of privacy policies have nonsignificant effects on privacy concerns. We also conduct various mediation analyses to extend our basic model. This study enriches the literature on privacy calculus theory and information disclosure behavior. Additionally, our findings shed light on the strategies that the social app operator can adopt to incentivize users to refrain from disclosing false information.