Transformative or Not? How Privacy Violation Experiences Influence Online Privacy Concerns and Online Information Disclosure

Philipp K. Masur*, Sabine Trepte

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Previous research has shown that people seldom experience privacy violations while using the Internet, such as unwanted and unknown sharing of personal information, credit card fraud, or identity theft. With this study, we ask whether individuals’ online privacy concerns increase and online information disclosure decreases if they experience such a worst-case scenario. Using representative data from a five-wave panel study (n ¼ 745), we found that people who generally experience more privacy violations also have stronger privacy concerns (between-person differences). However, people who experienced more privacy violations than usual in the last 6 months were only slightly more concerned afterward and did not change their disclosure behavior afterward (within-person effects). The need for privacy moderated these processes. We untangle under which circumstances such experiences may be transformative, and discuss practical and conceptual consequences of how experiences translate into concerns, but not necessarily behaviors.

Original languageEnglish
Article numberhqaa012
Pages (from-to)49-74
Number of pages26
JournalHuman Communication Research
Volume47
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, Funding number: 16KIS0094) awarded to Sabine Trepte.

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.

Funding

This research was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, Funding number: 16KIS0094) awarded to Sabine Trepte.

Keywords

  • Bayesian Statistics
  • Longitudinal Analysis
  • Online Information Disclosure
  • Online Privacy Concerns
  • Privacy Violations

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