Alleviating Consumers' Privacy Concerns in Location-Based Services: A Psychological Control Perspective

Location-based services (LBS), enabled by advances in mobile and positioning technologies, have afforded users with a pervasive flexibility to be uniquely addressable and to access network and services on-the-move. However, because LBS could also associate the lifestyle habits, behaviors, and movements with a consumer's personal identity, privacy concerns are particularly salient for LBS. Drawing on psychological control and privacy literature, we designed an experiment study to test the basic proposition that the assurance of consumers' perceived control over their personal information has a considerable influence on alleviating their privacy concerns. Three different mechanisms of assurance of control--technology, industry self-regulation, and legislation--were manipulated in the experiment, and their effects on consumers' privacy concerns were examined. The results indicated that the technological assurance mechanism (i.e., mobile device in this study) played the mos...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ICIS
• Authors: Heng Xu, Hock-Hai Teo
• Keywords: ICIS 2004, Information Technology, Privacy, Privacy Concerns, Psychological Control