Susceptibility to social influence of privacy behaviors: Peer versus authoritative sources

Tamir Mendel, Eran Toch

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Privacy in Online Social Networks (OSNs) is a dynamic concept, contingent on changes in technology and usage norms. Social influence is a major avenue for adopting online behaviors in general and privacy practices in particular. In this study, we examine how the source of influence affects the perceived behavioral intention to adopt privacy behavior. Our findings are based on a randomized experiment (167 U.S.-based Amazon Mechanical Turk workers) using a custom Facebook application that collects feedback from participants regarding their intention to adopt privacy practices from different types of sources, including authoritative organizations and Mends with varying tie strength correlative. Our results show that the source of social influence affects the susceptibility to adopt certain privacy behaviors and that there are different patterns of influence for security and privacy norms. More interestingly, susceptibility is modulated by the privacy perceptions of the user: users with high perceived behavioral control are more susceptible to peer influence. Additionally, we show that the intention to adopt privacy practices is correlated with the intention to further influence other people.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCSCW 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages581-593
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450343350
DOIs
StatePublished - 25 Feb 2017
Event2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017 - Portland, United States
Duration: 25 Feb 20171 Mar 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Conference

Conference2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland
Period25/02/171/03/17

Keywords

  • Authoritative influence
  • Behavioral intentions
  • Online Social Networks
  • Peer influence
  • Privacy
  • Social influence

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Human-Computer Interaction

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