Going private: exploring the impact of privacy protection initiatives in privacy concerns and information disclosure

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the sharing economy, but it also caused consumers to rethink the way they live, work, and travel. As a result, the sharing economy has shown resilience and is recovering from the pandemic's setbacks. Nevertheless, issues of trust, transparency, and regulations have emerged, and data privacy concerns have become increasingly important. For instance, incidents where the personal data of Uber and Airbnb users and employers were hacked and consumer data was revealed, as well as criticism of Airbnb's identity verification system and its use of consumer data, have raised concerns. Sharing economy businesses and governments have made significant efforts to address data privacy and transparency, especially since the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 (Urban, 2018).Recent literature refers to the conflict between consumers' willingness to compromise their privacy and certain gain benefits as the privacy paradox (Teubner & Flath, 2019). Consumers weigh potential risks and anticipated benefits in a decision-making process called privacy calculus. If perceived benefits are higher than perceived risks, consumers are more likely to disclose personal information (Dinev & Hart, 2006). This study aims to investigate how privacy protection initiatives, such as regulation awareness, perceived control over information, and perceived transparency, affect consumers' privacy calculus (i.e., privacy concerns and risk/benefit analysis) in the context of the sharing economy.Drawing on privacy calculus theory and analysing data from Airbnb users, this study found that perceived regulation awareness mitigates consumers' privacy concerns and perceived risk assessments, while it strengthens consumers' benefit perceptions and leads them to disclose information. On the other hand, perceived information transparency was found to mitigate consumers' privacy concerns and risk assessments, but it had no effect on their privacy concerns and benefit perceptions. Additionally, this study found that consumers' perceived risk is negatively related to their information disclosure, whereas perceived benefit is positively related to information disclosure when using sharing economy platforms.This study contributes to privacy-related research in two ways. Firstly, prior research on privacy calculus and privacy paradox in the sharing economy has mainly focused on the antecedents of privacy concerns, as well as why and when consumers disclose their information (Zhu & Grover, 2022). This research expands the privacy calculus model by considering current privacy protection initiatives. Secondly, despite the growing number of sharing economy users, the criticism of lacking privacy mechanisms is gaining considerable attention. Therefore, this study sheds light on how current initiatives taken by sharing economy platforms have influenced consumers' privacy calculus assessments.

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ORCID for Tugra Akarsu: orcid.org/0000-0003-0491-3707

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