Article Preview
TopIntroduction
It took only a couple of years for the Internet to turn from a repository of scholarly information, which was primarily used by academics, into a serious economic driver with unprecedented growth rates and worldwide coverage. With its potential for individualization, the World Wide Web has significantly influenced the way consumers and businesses conduct commercial transactions in this day and age. In order to target their customers in the best possible approach, companies need demographic, behavioral and attitudinal personal information (Reutterer, Mild, Natter, & Taudes, 2006; Heilman, Kaefer, & Ramenofsky, 2003). However, the process of collecting users’ data and personalizing goods and services can affect customers’ privacy concerns and their intention to shop online (Greenberg, Wong-On-Wong, & Lui, 2006; Sheng, Nah, & Siau, 2008).
In the online realm, even the visit of a virtual store leaves electronic traces behind, of which further usage of such data is often unknown to the users. Correspondingly, users’ privacy concerns have become the focus of attention for both practitioners and scholars (Smith, Milberg, & Burke, 1996; Stewart & Segars, 2002; Taylor, Davis, & Jillapalli, 2009; Volokh, 2000). Communicating with companies or completing transactions online requires personally identifying information which might impose a severe risk for consumers in the case of data misuse (Shih, Dedrick, & Kraemer, 2005). Even if their private information is used in compliance with the law, users inevitably forfeit parts of their privacy when interacting with businesses online (Feigenbaum, Parkes, & Pennock, 2009; Culnan & Armstrong, 1999).
We extend previous research, which has identified trust in the vendor (Pavlou, Liang, & Xue, 2007) and trust in the Internet (Dinev et al., 2006) as major antecedents to the disclosure of personal information, by adding the construct Perceived Risk of Personal Information. The importance of risk and trust in the context of online purchasing decisions has been highlighted in the literature (Kim, Ferrin, & Rao, 2009; Verhagen, Meents, & Tan, 2006). Other than in previous publications, we measure this construct by directly assessing users’ attitudes toward disclosing specific data types. Following the research from Xie, Teo, and Wan (2006), we take into account that a multitude of data types exists and that the risks involved in disclosing them varies between the different types. We therefore assume that the level of perceived risk an individual assigns to personal information affects the willingness to disclose it (Metzger, 2004; Li, Sarathy, & Xu, 2010), and that this effect might vary for different types of information (Krasnova, Spiekermann, Koroleva, & Hildebrand, 2010).