[ESSEC Knowledge] by Frank K.Y. Chan - Professor at ESSEC Business School

Internet privacy stories in recent years, like the Cambridge Analytica scandal and concerns over the new WhatsApp privacy policy, have sensitized us to the risk of putting our lives online. This affects people in different ways: some will up their privacy settings, some will stop using social media or shopping online, some won’t change anything at all. Frank Chan (ESSEC Business School) and his colleagues Weiyin Hong (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and James Thong (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) explored the drivers and inhibitors of Internet privacy concern in their recent paper in the Journal of Business Ethics to uncover how people form their relationship to Internet privacy, finding that these factors fall into four dimensions: environmental, individual, information management, and interaction management.

What impacts our relationship to Internet privacy?

To conceptualize their model, the researchers used multidimensional development theory, which proposes that privacy situations can be classified using the four dimensions described above, since someone’s privacy concerns will stem from a combination of their environment, their experience, and their interaction with other implicated parties. This provides a thorough understanding of how our relationship to Internet privacy develops, and why it presents differently for different people.

[To read the full article please follow this link.]