Information privacy refers to the desire of individuals to control or have some influence over data about themselves. Advances in information technology have raised concerns about information privacy and its impacts, and have motivated Information Systems researchers to explore information privacy issues, including technical solutions to address these concerns. In this paper, we inform researchers about the current state of information privacy research in IS through a critical analysis of the IS literature that considers information privacy as a key construct. The review of the literature reveals that information privacy is a multilevel concept, but rarely studied as such. We also find that information privacy research has been heavily reliant on studentbased and USA-centric samples, which results in findings of limited generalizability. Information privacy research focuses on explaining and predicting theoretical contributions, with few studies in journal articles focusing on design and action contributions. We recommend that future research should consider different levels of analysis as well as multilevel effects of information privacy. We illustrate this with a multilevel framework for information privacy concerns. We call for research on information privacy to use a broader diversity of sampling populations, and for more design and action information privacy research to be published in journal articles that can result in IT artifacts for protection or control of information privacy.Keywords: Information privacy, privacy, level of analysis, information privacy framework, information privacy concerns
Introduction
1The concept of information privacy existed long before information and communication technologies changed its occurrences, impacts, and management. In the mid-1980s, Mason (1986 suggested that the advent of the increased use of information technologies, or the Information Age, would lead to four major concerns about the use of information: privacy, accuracy, property, and accessibility (PAPA). This prediction proved to be accurate for each area, and particularly for privacy, which has been the subject of increasing concern over the years. A Pew Internet Project survey found that 85 percent of adults believed it was "very important" to control access to their personal information (Madden et al. 2007). Information privacy is also an important concern for corporations. In a survey, 85 percent of responding companies 1 M. Lynne Markus was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Paul Pavlou served as the associate editor.The appendices for this paper are located in the "Online Supplements" section of the MIS Quarterly's website (http://www.misq.org).
MIS Quarterly Vol. 35 No. 4 pp. 1017-1041/December 2011 1017Belanger & Crossler/Privacy in the Digital Age experienced some sort of reportable privacy breach during the previous year; 63 percent reported multiple breaches. The majority of the reporting companies stated that they spent their time reacting to privacy breaches as opposed to being proactiv...
