Privacy Concerns and Intention to disclose personal

information via mobile applications

Assessment Title: Research Proposal

Applicant Name: Ngo Binh Long

Word Count: 2741 (exclude the reference)

Date: 02/04/2023
Overview
Mobile phones have become extremely popular in recent years with most people in the world
owning one. The global smartphone penetration rate was estimated at 67 percent in 2021
(Statista, 2023). Wherever you go, there is someone calling, playing, or simply looking at their
phone. Mobile phones have drastically transformed the way people live today, they have
become a vital asset in our everyday lives, making it simpler for us to fulfil the majority of our
tasks. Phones have become quite useful in our daily lives, whether for research, entertainment,
communication with family, or use of social media, and no one can fathom life without them.
The increasing popularity of smartphones and tablet devices with billions of software (apps) has
opened up new marketing opportunities. As a result, marketers are always devising new
techniques for utilizing mobile devices in order to give customers with extra relevant mobile
contents and services.
The essential success of every innovative mobile app or service, however, is dependent on the
collection of personal information from consumers. Most mobile users feel that disclosing
personal information risks infringing on their privacy. Users can better portray themselves in a
virtual environment if they agree to provide personal information about what and how they do
in their everyday lives together with location and time data. As a result, persuading users to
reveal their personal information via their mobile devices has evolved into a strategic business
challenge that must be addressed before the mobile business (m-business) can supply
individualized products or services to clients.
Consumers are drawn to several features and apps on mobile devices in the m-business age,
including as social media, gaming, location-based services, real-time news, investing tools,
entertainment, travel guides, traffic updates, music, and e-books. Consumers are frequently
prompted to contribute their postings, images, location, money, and other associated personal
information in order to optimize the functionality of mobile applications or obtain promotional
materials (e.g., emoticons, points, and discounts). The sharing of personal information with a
high level of granularity raises the danger of compromising or abusing personal information
(Awad & Krishnan, 2006). With m-business, the dichotomy of receiving tailored services while
risking losing personal information is clear.
What motivates customers to willingly give their personal information in is a critical topic. The
current article investigates consumers' information concern-behavior consistency as well as
their views of exchange relationships with marketers that obtain and exploit personal
information. This paper, in particular, identifies the sorts of personal information customers are
willing to supply to direct marketers and other retailers, as well as specific elements and
situations that influence consumers' willingness to disclose personal information to direct
marketers and other merchants.
Literature review

Personal privacy concerns

In the digital age, absolute privacy is difficult to attain. Previous research has suggested several
driving factors of the benefits and risks in various research contexts, including traditional
transactions, online transactions, government surveillance and location-aware marketing. The
perceived benefits of information sharing via mobile devices and applications appeal to various
customers. Customers who use m-banking, for example, may quickly obtain information based on
their most recent transactions and discover how each purchase may affect their monthly spending
budget. Passengers obtain customized auxiliary services via their mobile phones to enhance their
trip experience (Morosan, 2015). Supermarket shoppers may speed up the checkout process and
easily acquire coupons via their mobile phones to save time and money (Danaher, Smith,
Ranasinghe, & Danaher, 2015).

Consumers are more inclined to provide personal information using mobile devices if the perceived
benefits are substantial. These tailored mobile services' success is strongly reliant on the acquisition
and analysis of precise personal information. Customers who receive tailored services run the
danger of having their personal information (such as location, purchasing preferences, medical
history, and social networks) hacked due to a lack of security management across servers and/or
client sites. As a result, perceived advantages and hazards must be examined concurrently in order
to comprehend consumers' decision to share personal information via mobile devices. Based on
privacy calculus theory, previous research has found numerous elements that influence risk
perception. Li (2012), for example, did a literature analysis and identified the elements that either
prohibit or stimulate personal information dissemination. According to the study, the bulk of
studies on this issue examine risks and rewards independently, and just a few studies have
examined the relative effect of privacy concerns on the intention to disclose personal information
in an e-commerce scenario (Dinev & Hart, 2003, 2006). This study seeks to address a research
vacuum by proposing a balanced method to assessing both the relative and combined advantages
and dangers of sharing personal information through mobile applications.

Material Object Part

In modern digital media ecosystem, mobile media devices have evolved into individualized,
transportable, and customizable "services hub[s]" (Hjorth, 2009). This disclosure will be seen as
frequent observing, "check-in" (Turkel, 2008), swiping, geo-tagging, and other growing behaviors
centered around mobile phones.

The ownership and close relationship between user and object has been highlighted in literature
on mobile media (Ling and Campbell, 2011; Thornham, 2014; Turkle, 2008); the experience of the
place is constantly changing and how that affects communication (Moores, 2012; Hine, 2015); the
social environment is changing (Ling and Campbell, 2011; Hjorth, Wilken and Gu, 2013); and the
changing patterns of communication and interaction (Hjorth, Burgess, and Richardson, 2012). The
prior research, in contrast, would have missed the owner's behaviors and how they had evolved
around the mobile phone. By analyzing the users' object immersion, physical presence, and
everyday routine activities, my research will investigate the mobilized practices and experiences.

As people and connections are incorporated into mobile software, the availability of mobile
technology has increased the significance of mobile apps even more. Technologies that bind us
to real people are being replaced by those that bind us to avatars of real people (Turkle, 2008).
Researchers have observed a shift towards mobile devices with applications, including the
acceleration of "co-presence", an increase in personal production and consumption activities,
as well as the expansion of identity and improved intimacy. My research will expand on this to
include the owner's revised perceptions of the device, their comprehension of usage in this
novel social context, and the contribution that mobile phones, along with social media and
other technologies, make to the transformation of connectivity experiences and the emergence
of new kinds of practices.

Technical Part

Mobile applications have a significant influence on how people live today, making it easier for
us to do the bulk of our chores on a daily basis. Self-disclosure will be seen as the interaction
and interplay between the users and the platform in order to show how activities and habits
are created, defined, and molded by technology.

Platform designs are designed to entice but also constrain users into specific roles and
behavioral patterns. Affordances and features (Treem and Leonardi, 2012), algorithms,
formatted protocols, and strategic interfaces with default settings of coding technologies that
social media platforms employ to influence users' behavior have all been the subject of prior
studies. By contrast, page layout and graphic design receive less consideration. My research will
fill in this gap by examining how the digital self is calibrated based on the technology offered
and how these components might serve as a vehicle for the online community that offers
participants' practices and experiences structure and coherence.

By capturing and utilizing user data, computer output may also be directly molded by human
input. This piqued my curiosity in exploring big data. Researchers have looked at its different
components at the techno-cultural level, such as data collection and organization (Kitchin,
2014; Schönberger and Cukier, 2013), patterns and correlations in data (Kitchin, 2014), and
forecasts for developing services (Ellison, 2013). My research will look into how the platform
interprets participants' online behaviors and steers specific needs through data quantification
and measurement, as well as shift its focus from sites to mobile apps—devices that accompany
individuals that generate data that can track and trace movement and construct meta maps
across time and space. The usage of digital media has peaks and troughs; regrettably, existing
study only focuses on one specific aspect or time period. In contrast, my research will look at
practices holistically and over a longer period of time, allowing for a more in-depth
understanding of what is going on.

Methodology

Questionnaire design

This study seeks to identify the types of personal information that customers are prepared to
provide, as well as the precise aspects and circumstances that impact consumers' readiness to
disclose personal information. This section explains how the systematic approach was chosen
and how the fieldwork would be carried out in order to answer portions of the research
questions.

The respondents will be solicited to an online survey by paid advertising on internet portals and
researcher networks, and the poll will be used to gather data for hypothesis testing. Because
mobile applications are so significant in our lives, my research will reach out various user
groups ranging from 16 to 60 years old who have a strong interest in mobile apps, social media,
social networking, and so on. It is feasible to examine if the various usage patterns,
interpersonal relationships, personal, age, and gender identities that impact the readiness to
give personal information through applications by enrolling both young and elderly, male and
female respondents. To attract additional possible participants, the research information will
also disseminate on the university's student networks and on the researcher’s own fan pages.
The questionnaire will consist of three parts. The goal and setting of the research will describe
in the first section. The respondents will ask to express their views on each of the measurement
items in the second part. To prevent responder weariness and to generate a psychological
break, it will be tried to balance the order of the questions of various constructs (Podsakoff,
MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003). The demographic questions will be found in the third part.
All responders' identities and confidentiality will be upheld. Seven components will be included
in the research model: desire to use mobile applications for disconnection, self-presentation,
individualized services, perceived severity, perceived control, perceived advantages, and
perceived hazards. To meet the current study environment, all questionnaire items will be
modified from the available literature, and they will be evaluated using a seven-point Likert
scale ranging from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 7 (strongly agree”). Demographic details including
gender and education level will be included as the control variables. Prior research suggested
that earlier mobile app usage experiences might affect the desire to provide personal
information (Bansal, Zahedi, & Gefen 2010). Three control variables—the years of smartphone
ownership, the number of hours per week spent using mobile applications, and the number of
apps used each week—will be included to the analysis to help mitigate the possible impact of
earlier experiences.
Interview and Observation

Because mobile applications are so significant in our lives, my research will reach out various
user groups ranging from 16 to 60 years old who have a strong interest in mobile apps, social
media, social networking, and so on. It is feasible to examine if the various usage patterns,
interpersonal relationships, personal, age, and gender identities that impact the readiness to
give personal information through applications by enrolling both young and elderly, male and
female respondents. The project will select typical applications from different fields (social
networking, banking, shopping, healthcare, etc.) to research. This can help researchers better
understand why people are ready to provide personal information with mobile applications.

The study begins with quantitative survey-based methodologies, which are augmented with
content analysis. In the online survey, participants are requested to give information on which
apps they reveal their information to and why in order to map the general landscape of their
behaviors. A large sample content analysis gave measurable assessments of how individuals
depict themselves, as well as recognizing commonalities and variances in the kind of personal
information they disclose. The phase will define and forecast usage patterns across various
categories of individuals, as well as similar statistical results and general trends.

In-depth interviews and observation will be conducted throughout the qualitative phase to
better understand the key themes and aspects of people's values and behavior. In semi-
structured interviews, specific questions and subjects are explored in order to anchor the exact
answer of the communicative, explorative, and performative parts of people's information
disclosure, as well as the circumstances in which they behave. Through participating in the
participants' own surroundings, online observation will also be used to communicate
participants' perspectives. In the ethnography tradition, these methods are frequently used to
generate an embedded description and understanding of participants' use of and through
digital technologies and content in the context of individual everyday practices, experience,
relationships, and routines, allowing for a stronger triangulation of data (Pink, Horst, Postill,
Hjorth, Lewis and Tacchi, 2016). This phase will include a longitudinal examination of the
revealed material as well as changes in their practice over time.

Careful observation of participants can help to develop an understanding of the structuring

potential of technology infrastructures (Hine, 2015). In this phase, web analytics and social
media analytics will be used to track users' interactions with a specific platform. Participants'
online behaviors will be captured using log files and page tagging, and the data will be classified
into four web analytics metrics: site content, site use, referral data, and quality assurance. The
data analysis of mobile apps will be provided by social media analytics in order to produce
useful key performance indicators. Using computational linguistics and natural language
processing, sentiment analysis will be used to determine participants' opinions, attitudes, and
emotions. Visual analytics may display and analyse the correlations between variables using
graphical user interfaces (Wamba, Akter, and Kang, 2016). These techniques are crucial for
comprehending the combined resources, seeing patterns, structures, and trends, adapting to
factors, and guiding the platform's functioning in the future. Together with data analysis, it will
also be required to become active in the organization's management and speak with specialists
to better understand how the internet is defined and how users' actions are created and
consumed. To gain an insider's viewpoint and learn more about the work that goes on behind
the scenes, it is crucial that you engage in this practical job.

Using experimental study, this phase will investigate the function of mobile phones in people's
lives. This may be used to investigate the causal relationship between people's behavior and
communicatively relevant mobile apps. Participants will be randomly allocated to one of three
treatment groups, with some using the mobile application, some using the mobile site version,
and the remainder using the PC online version. To evaluate the responsive practices, a number
of measuring methodologies will be applied (such as the noticing of the object and frequency of
using one app). The data was based on self-reported consumption and observation, and
subjects from each age group were mixed to guarantee similar conditions.

The key ethical and practical issue that has to be addressed is the use of personal information,
which affects individual privacy. Participants will be made fully aware of the nature of the
research and how their personal information will be used; participants' anonymity will be
respected; and any data obtained will be used exclusively for the purposes of the study and
discarded after the study is over. Also, the obtained data should be carefully analyzed because
some of it is self-reported data, which can give helpful information but has limits because
people may (intentionally or inadvertently) falsify their disclosure of personal information
levels.

Progress Plan:

2023: Be ready for empirical work and preliminary writing. This year, I want to study extensively
on the subject, focusing on research topics such as disciplines that require user information,
online personal information disclosure, self-representation, mobile technologies, and research
techniques. Next, I'll refine my study based on past findings and write the literature review.
Following that, I will construct the methodology section, which includes recruiting volunteers
for the research.

2024: I will begin planning the research, developing a timeline, considering ethical
considerations, and resolving any potential difficulties and hurdles. Next, I'll do the research,
from data collection through data analysis. I will reach a conclusion based on the findings of my
investigation and intend to write an essay based on my preliminary findings.
2025 marks the end of the writing process. I'll combine the prior written sections, revise my
theory, and write the methodologies and case study chapters. Lastly, I will proofread all of my
research parts.
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