Exploring Motivations for Online Privacy Protection Behavior: Insights From Panel Data

Abstract

Personally managing and protecting online privacy has become an essential part of everyday life. This research draws on the protection motivation theory (PMT) to investigate privacy protective behavior online. A two-wave panel study (N = 928) shows that (1) people rarely to occasionally protect their online privacy and (2) people most often delete cookies and browser history or decline cookies to protect their online privacy. In addition, (3) the perceived threat is high: People perceive the collection, usage, and sharing of personal information as a severe problem to which they are susceptible. The coping appraisal is mixed: Although people do have confidence in some protective measures, they have little confidence in their own efficacy to protect their online privacy. Moreover, privacy protective behavior is affected by perceived severity and response efficacy. These findings emphasize the relevance of the PMT in the context of privacy threats, and have important implications for regulators.

Protective behavior against personalized ads: Motivation to turn personalization off

“…In the health context, perceived severity of a disease has indeed been shown as a trigger of protection motivation (Katz et al, 2009). Similar findings have been concluded in the context of general privacy protection (Boerman et al, 2018): consumers who consider data collection online a problem, are more motivated to protect themselves.…”

“…While the impact of self-efficacy has been widely investigated in the online data protection context, response efficacy has received considerably less attention. Boerman et al, (2018) showed the significant positive impact of response efficacy on protection motivation for different types of online privacy protection. In fact, technical knowledge how data is collected and used puts consumers in the position to be able to ask the follow up question: how to protect myself, and consider their options, e.g., the opt-out functions offered by AdChoices and Google.…”

“…Perceived severity. Perceived severity, i.e., people's perceptions of the severity of the collection, usage, and sharing of their online behavior for personalization purposes was measured with three statements (1 = Strongly disagree, 7 = Strongly agree) derived from Boerman et al (2018). The mean of the three items is used as a measure of perceived severity (Cronbach's alpha = .9, M = 5, SD = 1.50).…”

No Ad Blockers for Old Men? Demographic Evidence for Ad Blocker Usage From Germany

“…Young reported in his study, that "older individuals tended to report using ad blockers less [than younger individuals]" (Young, 2016). In another research it has been stated that there are no significant differences younger and older adults with respect to privacy concerns and privacy protective behaviors (Boerman et al, 2018)-both motivational factors for the usage of ad blockers as stated before. A significant difference was shown by Zhao et al, which stated that "people who are younger than 34 are more likely to use ad blockers" (Zhao et al, 2017).…”

“…Researches in the behavioral field contains researches into the identification of factors influencing the usage of ad blockers. The most important factors leading the use of ad blocker are the needs for security/privacy, for avoiding further interruption online and for page loading speed (Boerman, Kruikemeier, & Zuiderveen Borgesius, 2018;Brinson et al, 2018;Mccoy, Everard, Polak, & Galletta, 2007;Redondo & Aznar, 2018;Zhao et al, 2017).…”