Voluntary sharing and mandatory provision: Private information disclosure on social networking sites

Abstract

Private information disclosure on social networking sites (SNS) is one of the most important and active issues in the information management arena. The growing phenomenon of platforms requiring users to disclose personal information exposes the limitations of previous studies that only focus on users’ voluntary disclosure. In this study, we define two modes of users’ private information disclosure behavior: voluntary sharing and mandatory provision. Using the Communication Privacy Management theory, we built a framework to explain the impact of individual characteristics, context, motivation, and benefit–risk ratio on the user's willingness to disclose voluntarily or mandatorily. Our research shows that voluntary sharing is more likely to be driven by positive factors, such as perceived benefits, social network size, and personalization, while mandatory provision is affected by individual characteristics such as age, privacy policy, and perceived risks. One of our interesting findings is that perceived risk has less impact on voluntary sharing than previous studies suggested. When encouraging users to share information voluntarily, platforms do not need to pay as much attention to reducing perceived risk as in the mandatory providing mode, but should focus on improving perceived benefits. Being the first to classify and compare the private information disclosure modes of SNS users, our research enriches the existing literature and opens up new avenues for researchers and social networking platforms.