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The privacy paradox is pervasive in social networking sites (SNSs). Although SNS users value their privacy, users need to disclose their personal information to socialize and use the services provided by SNSs (Wilson & Valacich, 2012; Kokolakis, 2017; Adjerid et al., 2018).
Researchers have proposed multiple theoretical explanations for the privacy paradox, including privacy calculus, cognitive bias, and social theories (Kokolakis, 2017; Gerber et al., 2018; Zhu et al., 2021; Jernejcic et al., 2022). In addition, models for the formation path of privacy paradoxes have been developed considering different scenarios, and the influence of specific factors on the privacy paradox mechanism has been investigated (Zhang et al., 2018; Wu, 2019; Alashoor et al., 2022).
The expansion of the information age has led to users’ experiencing a feeling of losing control over personal data management, resulting in a sense of weariness toward privacy issues; this is referred to as privacy fatigue (Choi et al., 2018; Shao et al., 2022). The influence of privacy fatigue on users’ disclosure intentions has been explored (Choi et al., 2018; Zhu et al., 2021; Shao et al., 2022), verifying that privacy fatigue affects users’ disclosure intentions under different scenarios. Users’ disclosure intentions and actual behaviors directly affect the privacy paradox. However, the effect of privacy fatigue on the privacy paradox among SNS users has not yet been investigated.
In this study, we selected WeChat, the most popular Chinese SNS, to explore the effect of privacy fatigue on personal information disclosure intention and the actual behavior ofSNS users. The objective of this study is to explain the phenomenon of privacy paradox from the perspective of privacy fatigue and provide implications for reducing privacy fatigue and mitigating the privacy paradox.
The contributions of this study can be summarized as follows:
Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to explore the effect of privacy fatigue on the personal information disclosure intentions and behaviors of WeChat users.
This study presents theoretical implications for a direct understanding of privacy fatigue among SNS users and the practical implications for SNS service providers to ensure better privacy management.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The second section reviews the related work on the privacy paradox and privacy fatigue, describes the research model, and presents the research hypotheses. The third section presents the methodology of this study, including the questionnaire design and data collection method. The study findings are presented in the fourth section, including the results of descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), SEM, and the mediating effect test. The fifth section discusses the theoretical and practical implications, and the final section summarizes the conclusions of our analysis.