Why do people share their context information on Social Network Services? A qualitative study and an experimental study on users' behavior of balancing perceived benefit and risk

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2013.01.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Perceived expected benefit influences on users' intention to share context information more than risk does.

  • Too high perceived expected risk is undesirable, but also risk need not to be too low if it reduces benefit.

  • Only perceived expected risk differ with the context information type.

  • Users employ not only the means provided by system but also various kinds of manual controls.

Abstract

Despite the rapid growth of context-aware systems and ubiquitous computing, the factors influencing users' decision to share their context information in a social setting are poorly understood. This study aims to clarify why users share their context information in social network service (SNS), even while they are concerned with the potential risk at the same time. Drawing on the diverse theories of self-disclosure, we take an approach that the consideration of benefit encourages users to endure the existence of risk, and that users actively adjust the way they share their information to optimize the level of benefit and risk. In a qualitative study, we examined what kinds of risks and benefits exist in context information sharing situations and how users control them. An experiment was conducted using stimuli that simulate the actual use of SNS to investigate the effect of various context types and control types on users' expected benefit and risk and their intention to share. The results showed that both expected benefit and expected risk influenced users' intention to share. More interestingly, the effect of expected benefit was found to be stronger than that of expected risk. Moreover, different privacy control strategies were found to have induced different effects on the expected benefit and expected risk. Implications and limitations of this study were proposed at the end of this study.

Introduction

In recent years, ubiquitous computing technologies have rapidly grown, including one of the most representative technologies, mobile internet (Dong et al., 2009, Shilton, 2009, Wilson et al., 2011). It enables people to communicate with others whenever they want and wherever they are. Thanks to emergence of mobile communication technology, there are an increasing number of users sharing information about their situation in real-time, to share their experiences with others using social network service (SNS).

We examined users' pattern of SNS usage in the sharing of context information and found that most controversial phenomena, AB dichotomy, in the field of privacy studies is also present. The ‘AB dichotomy’ (Acquisti and Grossklags, 2005, Reynolds et al., 2011) refers to a user's contradictory actions when having a high level of privacy concern (Attitude) but sharing private context information actively (Behavior). Why do users share context information with other users that could result in an undesirable outcome of privacy intrusion? Clarifying factors that influence users' decision making when they share their context information can shed light on the design of context information sharing systems.

Despite of a large amount of previous researches analyzing the risks and benefits of human behavior including self-disclosure (Coleman and Fararo, 1992, Kahneman and Tversky, 1979, Loomes and Sugden, 1982), relatively little research has been carried out on the context information sharing on SNS from the perspective of balancing process between expected benefit and expected risk. Most previous researches dealing with information sharing and social interaction on SNS had focused on analyzing risks (Al-Muhtadi et al., 2002, Hong et al., 2004, Lederer et al., 2003, Saponas et al., 2007), and few researches covering benefits and risks at the same time. We hypothesize that users may consider benefits as well as risks and they make an effort to reduce risks and increase benefits using various means to share their information strategically.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the benefit and risk factors that people consider when they share their context information with others and what kind of behaviors they enact to maximize benefits and to minimize risks in that process. Accordingly, our research questions are as follows: First, does intention to share context information in social situations depend on expected benefits and risks? We are especially interested in whether the benefit–risk approach is still valid even when it is highly unpredictable. Second, do the different types of context information induce different expected benefit and expected risk when people share context information? Third, does using various controls mechanisms to protect private information affect the expected benefit and expected risk of sharing context information? A qualitative study and controlled experiment that simulated the actual sharing of context information were conducted to answer our research questions.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the relevant research and theories. Section 3 sets up the hypothesis based on existing theories. Section 4 explains the procedure and the consequences of qualitative studies. Section 5 deal with the overall method, data analysis and procedure and result of the experiment. Section 6 includes discusses the implications and limitations of the study and Section 7 presents conclusion of this study.

Section snippets

Context information

As a comprehensive term, many researchers define ‘context’ differently. Dey et al. (2001) define it, referring to context as any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. The term ‘entity’ includes a person, place or object. Similarly, others view context as the circumstances relevant to the interaction between a user and their computing environment (Abowd et al., 1999, Chalmers, 2002). Some researchers restrict the range of entities to only the users interacting

Research hypothesis

We expect that benefit and risk are considered simultaneously in the process of context information sharing, even though they are ambiguous in a social setting. According to Social Penetration Theory (SPT), which explains interpersonal relationship development, people tend to predict the cost and reward of disclosure, and take into account the result of the comparison (Berg, 1984). Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory also points out that the benefit–risk ratio is a crucial reference

Qualitative study

A qualitative study was implemented to investigate how actual sharing of context information occurs in real settings such as SNS and LBSNS (Location-Based Social Network Services, e.g. foursquare and I'M IN). We identify the factors that users take into account when they use real services in their daily life, the types of risk and benefit they experienced or anticipated when sharing context information and users' control to reduce expected risk while maximizing expected benefit.

Experiment

Before the experiment, we conduct the pre-test to select some constructs for our experiments and developing and testing the measurements. We carried out an online survey to examine which benefits and risks are commonly expected when sharing context information and piloted a study to test measurement items. Details of the pretest are presented on Fig. A4. Also, measurement items and the related references are presented on Fig. A5.

Discussion

At the beginning of this paper, we posed several research questions. Does intention to share context information in social situations depend on expected benefits and risks? In our qualitative study, we found that there are various types of benefit and risk when sharing context information in a social setting. In addition, our experiment results showed that both expected benefit and expected risk significantly influenced users' intention to share. In particular, expected benefit caused greater

Conclusion

In this paper, we analyzed the usage pattern of context sharing on SNS focusing on the users' consideration of expected benefit and expected risk. The result showed that intention to share context information is influenced by expected benefit and expected risk simultaneously. Especially, the effect of expected benefit is larger than that of expected risk. Also, the pattern of expected risk changed according to the sensitivity of context information to be shared. Lastly, expected benefit and

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2011-0012490). The authors appreciate Jonathan Balkind for proof reading the article and Seseok Oh for providing language help.

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