Influence of privacy and communication factors on online behavior

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question how important are privacy and communication and self-expression needs in social networks on the internet, especially in the case of uploading photos. Therefore, the existing privacy calculus model of Dinev and Hart (2006) will be enlarged with new constructs and checked for validation.

For the application and verification of the proposed research model, an online survey was carried out. Within the data analysis phase, several methods, for example, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, have been integrated, and the most important measures (e.g. Cronbach’s alpha and fit indices) have been calculated. This allows the existence of the requirements for important quality criteria for measurement models, for example, reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity and model fit, to be checked.

The results confirm the fit of the proposed research model. The needs of all quality criteria are fulfilled. This indicates that the proposed research model helps to investigate the influence of privacy and communication factors on online behavior. In addition, the results show that the willingness to provide images on the internet is highly influenced by communication and self-presentation needs and the internet trust also has an influence on the willingness to provide images on the internet.

This paper is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, which considers privacy concerns and communication needs when analyzing the behavior of users of social network services, exemplarily for the case of uploading photos. This will give the growing research field of online services a new tool to properly take these important factors into account.