Trading friendship for value: An investigation of collective privacy concerns in social application usage

Abstract

Online social applications do not only acquire individuals' personal information but also at times collect the personal information of an individual's social networks. Despite the importance of protecting collective privacy, this topic has received little attention in the information system community. To fill this gap in the literature, this article focuses on three unique issues pertinent to collective privacy. First, drawing on the Communication Privacy Management theory, we offer a theoretical framework on the dimensionality of collective privacy concerns (CPC). Second, we propose to operationalize the three dimensions of CPC using a second-order reflective construct, and we plan to develop a scale for it. Third, we identify antecedents of CPC pertinent to the context of social application usage and propose to test a research model on the relationships between these antecedents and CPC as well as the downstream effect on behavioral intentions. © (2013) by the AIS/ICIS Administrative Office All rights reserved.