Impact of the Matching Effect Between Permission Time and Message Framing on Privacy Disclosure Willingness

Pan Ding; Xie Han

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20200817.301

Summary

With the advent of the era of big data, consumers’ personal information is becoming more and more important to enterprises, which is the key to improve competitive advantages. However, consumers’ awareness of privacy protection is also increasing. Consumers have a strong resistance to businesses’ requests for private information, but they also need to provide private information to obtain personalized services. This makes consumers’ privacy preference and privacy disclosure willingness contextual and dynamic. And time is an important factor in the privacy context, which will greatly affect the validity of privacy permission requests. Moreover, there is still a wide debate on when enterprises should permit privacy information. Therefore, enterprises are faced with the dilemma of collecting data which is not currently used but may be needed in the future, and this seems to be a difficult choice. Privacy preference and behaviors are malleable and largely influenced by the context. However, consumers are mostly not completely rational, and different contexts will activate the cognitive adjustment of different types of information, thus affecting subsequent consumption decisions. Since privacy decisions involve higher risks, individual decision-making, especially risk preference, often changes due to the way information is expressed, so there is a framing effect. Whether different message framing can meet the different psychological needs of consumers under different permission times, and how the interaction of the two affects consumers’ risk preference are the focus of this paper. Because of this, this paper examines the impact of privacy permission time and communication methods on consumers’ privacy preference through two experiments. The study finds that in the case of “permission in advance”（that is, consumers are required to permit at the beginning of the service）, consumers will feel a high degree of uncertainty. At this time, the adoption of message framing that emphasizes “loss of permission” can reduce perceived uncertainty and enhance consumers’ willingness to disclose privacy. In the case of “timely authorization”（that is, consumers are required to permit in the course of providing the service）, consumers will feel a high sense of compulsion. Adopting the message framing that emphasizes “permitted benefits” can reduce consumers’ forced exposure and thus increase their willingness to disclose. The research of this paper has a certain enlightenment significance for enterprises to understand consumers’ privacy preference and psychological needs in-depth, to adopt certain strategies to alleviate privacy contradictions, regulate the way of information collection, and improve the personalized service experience.