Download This PaperAffect and Online Privacy Concerns
9 Pages Posted: 4 May 2012 Last revised: 21 Aug 2014
Date Written: May 3, 2012
Abstract
Privacy risks are pervasive and while considerable work is available on cognitive aspects of privacy concern, very little is known about the emotional/affective aspect of privacy risk. Recent experimental evidence, suggests that contextual cues, rather than deliberate evaluation of costs and benefits of privacy, affect people’s privacy behaviors. This finding raises fundamental questions about the role of privacy concern in theory, the measurement of privacy concern and also in its utility in explaining privacy behavior in real-life decisions. Affect, a “faint whisper of emotion” which occurs automatically in any evaluation of risk and influences risk perception and evaluation, has received lot of attention in the literature. In this research, we examine the relative role of affect and cognition on people’s judgments of privacy risk. An experiment is proposed.
Keywords: affect, privacy risk, online risk
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation