Impact of SNS Diversity and Privacy Concerns on Information Seeking through Smartphones

The smartphone industry has innovated and advanced specifically in the last decade in order to modify smartphones into personal computers. This enables users to efficiently achieve many tasks including utilizing search engines for instant information retrieval anytime and anywhere. Yet many users choose not to use these smartphone features including search engines to seek information. This study investigates the factors that impact the likelihood of seeking information via smartphones. The diversity of social networking sites and privacy concerns are found to be two of the main factors influencing the likelihood of seeking information. Android users are more likely to seek information compared to IPhone users, which is perhaps due to the differences in the features of the operating systems of these phone. Motivation to seek information captured by technology ownership increases the likelihood of information seeking.