Trusting those who trust you: A study on trust and privacy on Facebook

Over more than a decade, IS research has examined the role of trust in the context of technology adoption such as website acceptance (Gefen et al. 2003), successful online interactions (Coppola et al. 2004) and recommendation agents usage (Wang and Benbasat 2005). The primary antecedent of trust in the line of research is often trustee’s trustworthiness. However, Dashiti et al. (2011) articulated the role of trustreceived (trustor’s felt trust from trustee) will cause trust-given (trustor’s trust in trustee) and later the trusting behaviors in the e-government context. Drawing on the recent development, this study aims to investigate the context of online social networks (OSNs) and to test whether trustreceived plays a similar role in forming the interpersonal trust among Facebook user’s interactions. We aim to find out (i) whether users are more willing to trust others and share their personal information with them when individuals experienced trust-received and (ii) what IT features influence trust-received.