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In this study, we intend to investigate the effect of awareness on smart device’s users and see whether they are aware of the privacy issues related to using these devices and whether they will change their behavior towards downloading the apps in the future. According to the cognate-based view of privacy, the way an individual user processes information varies depending on the context and their characteristics. Therefore, we study users’ behavior in various contexts considering different categories of the applications and various individual user’s characteristics.
Based on the privacy literature and social cognitive theory, we hypothesize the relationships between privacy awareness and intention to download a smart device application. We conduct a pre-post experiment by surveying smart device users. We ask them about their individual characteristics such as age, gender, and level of education and analyze their responses across eight categories of applications: entertainment, games, social networking, news, navigation and weather, finance, lifestyle, and other specific applications. In this study, we are studying the impact of privacy awareness on smart device user’s privacy behavior considering their individual differences and different categories of smart device applications. Specifically, we try to determine the answers to the following questions: