Information Privacy Concerns among novice and Expert Users of SoLoMo

SoLoMo (Social-Local-Mobile) services are becoming dominant to the huge population of semiliterate users living in emerging economies due to low costs and ubiquity. However, usage of SoLoMo services is still susceptible by information privacy concerns. Studies typically addressed the ways to mitigate information privacy concerns for the literate users and not the semi-literate users. To fill the gap of semi-literate users and have a better understanding of the information privacy concerns among different communities, this study draws upon theories of privacy calculus, familiarity, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and protection motivation to identify the precursors of information privacy concerns related to SoLoMo services and users’ expertise. The proposed research model is empirically tested in a laboratory experiment. The findings show that the two channels (covert and overt) of delivering SoLoMo services affect the degree of information privacy concerns between the literate and semi-literate users. Implications for improving usage intentions and mitigating information privacy concerns for SoLoMo services for different types of mobile applications are discussed.