Personalization–privacy Paradox: an Empirical Assessment from a Field Experiment on Smartphone Users

Privacy has been an enduring concern associated with commercial information technology (IT) applications, in particular regarding the issue of personalization. IT-enabled personalization, while potentially making the user computing experience more gratifying, often relies heavily on the user’s personal information to deliver individualized services, which raises the user’s privacy concerns. We term the tension between personalization and privacy, which follows from marketers exploiting consumers’ data to offer personalized product information, the personalization–privacy paradox. To better understand this paradox, we build on the theoretical lenses of uses and gratification theory and information boundary theory to conceptualize the extent to which privacy impacts the process and content gratifications derived from personalization, and how an IT solution can be designed to alleviate privacy concerns. 1