The Effect of Online Privacy Information on Privacy Evaluations in Using Mobile Fitness Applications

This paper proposes an investigation on the effect of online privacy information on privacy evaluation in using mobile fitness applications. Drawing on the justice framework, we identify three key types of annotated privacy information, namely social rating, profile control, and security conformity, to be particularly important to users’ transactional privacy trade-off in evaluating mobile fitness applications. To reflect the unique context of mobile fitness applications, we conceptualize profile delegation privacy risks as the transactional cost whereas physical fitness improvements as the transactional benefit in users’ privacy trade-off. More importantly, this proposal attempts to elucidate the distinction between dispositional privacy concerns and transactional privacy trade-off. To do so, we plan to investigate the way dispositional privacy concerns moderate the effect of transactional trade-off on disclosure behaviour. The hypothesized research model will be tested by a laboratory experiment. Expected contributions are discussed.