The Relevance of Privacy Concerns, Trust, and Risk for Hybrid Social Media

Angela Borchert, Aidmar Wainakh, Nicole Krämer, Max Mühlhäuser, Maritta Heisel

Abstract: Users generate a massive amount of personal, partly sensitive data in online social media. In the past, data breaches made evident that service providers of social media lack in adequately protecting this data leading to user concerns in regards to their privacy. Privacy-preserving social media emerged to address this issue by providing more secure environments for private social exchanges. However, these platforms often fall short of attracting users away from conventional social media and establishing users’ trust in them. In this work, we aim to enhance the trustworthiness of privacy-preserving social media, in particular a hybrid social media application. For this purpose, we first analyze the relationships between privacy concerns, trusting beliefs, risk beliefs, and willingness to use. Second, we examine the effect of user characteristics on these relationships. Third, we mitigate privacy concerns via trust-related software features developed with the TrustSoFt method. We conduct a thorough user study to assess the impact of these features on the privacy concerns and trustworthiness. Our findings indicate the special importance of addressing particular privacy concerns, such as “Awareness of Privacy Practices”. Furthermore, results suggest that older individuals as well as individuals that have experience with privacy incidents, are more susceptible to trust-related software features.