Privacy and information disclosure on the internet, 2023

The research is part of a doctoral dissertation entitled "A comprehensive measurement framework for information privacy concerns in online contexts." The dissertation addresses the concept of ‘information privacy concerns,’ which plays a central role in the research on privacy-related human behaviour on the internet. While there are several conceptualisation and operationalisation of this concept in the literature, there is a lack of clear definition and understanding of the similarities and differences between the two types of information privacy concerns, horizontal and vertical information privacy concerns. This study represents the second (and final) phase of doctoral dissertation's empirical research. Past systematic literature reviews and focus group study (See Study IZI22) provided the basis for development of survey scales for measuring vertical and horizontal information privacy concerns as well as for an elaboration of an explanatory model to test the hypothesis about differential effects of horizontal and vertical information privacy concerns on willingness to disclose personal information in different online contexts. This study empirically measures the concepts of the explanatory model and enables the validation of the survey scales and the testing of the proposed hypothesis.

本研究隶属于一篇题为《线上场景下信息隐私顾虑的综合测量框架》的博士学位论文。该论文围绕“信息隐私顾虑（information privacy concerns）”这一概念展开，其在互联网隐私相关人类行为研究中占据核心地位。尽管现有文献已针对该概念提出多种概念化与操作化路径，但学界对横向信息隐私顾虑（horizontal information privacy concerns）与纵向信息隐私顾虑（vertical information privacy concerns）这两类隐私顾虑的异同，仍缺乏清晰的界定与认知。本研究属于该博士论文实证研究的第二阶段，亦是最后阶段。此前开展的系统文献综述与焦点小组研究（参见研究IZI22），为测量横向与纵向信息隐私顾虑的调研量表开发，以及构建用于检验两类隐私顾虑对不同线上场景下个人信息披露意愿的差异化影响假说的解释模型，提供了核心依据。本研究通过实证方式对该解释模型中的各概念进行测量，同时实现了对调研量表的效度验证与所提假说的检验。