Information Disclosure on a Chinese Social Media Platform

Abstract

The nature of social media encourages people to contribute voluntarily to public web and inevitably, leaving a persistent and cumulative repository of personal information. Aware of the privacy risks, about one third of the Internet users in the United States have expressed concerns of their personal privacy. However, users are often cavalier in the protection of their own data profile. There is often a discrepancy between users’ intentions to protect privacy and their actual heavier. This behavior is often terms as “privacy paradox”. The privacy paradox might arise because users balance between risks and benefits of disclosing information on social media. Using the privacy calculus model as the theoretical background, the study examines how perceived risks and benefits affect information disclosure behavior on a Chinese social media site. In addition, the study investigates the antecedents of perceived benefits and risks as well as the effect of gender on information disclosure behavior. 420 valid responses were collected from a Chinese crowdsourcing website. Partial Least Squares (PLS), specifically SmartPLS 2.0, was used to assess the psychometric properties of the measurement model and to test the hypotheses. The study finds that perceived privacy risk is not significantly related to information disclosure (β=-0.01, p>0.10). However, the relationship between perceived benefits and information disclosure is significant (β=0.18, p

Research Areas