Discerning the effect of privacy information transparency on privacy fatigue in e-government

Highlights

• The effect of privacy information transparency and privacy fatigue is studied in e-government.

• Privacy fatigue is manifested in emotional exhaustion and cynicism behaviour.

• Data collection and data use information aspects affect privacy information transparency.

• Low privacy information transparency mainly increases cynicism behaviour.

Abstract

Privacy information transparency is generally considered desirable and should be enabled and upheld. It has gained increasing attention giving the emergence of new information technologies and their affordances for e-governance and governments. This study examines the proposition that privacy information transparency is amiable to mitigating privacy fatigue in e-government. The study identifies the antecedents of privacy information transparency of an e-government website, and its influence on privacy fatigue manifested in emotional exhaustion and cynicism. A survey conducted in Cyprus harnessed user responses, and the data analyzed using a partial least square structural equation analysis method. Findings reveal that; (1) user data collection and data use information aspects of online privacy significantly impact privacy information transparency; and (2) privacy information transparency positively impacts both cynicism behaviour and emotional exhaustion. This study extends the concept of privacy fatigue into e-government and contributes to an empirical evaluation of its relationship with privacy information transparency.

Introduction

Developments in information technology (IT) have exposed the challenges, needs, and workings of the society around us. Despite this fact, they have also aligned these facets into streamlined, coherent human convenient processes (Mutimukwe, Kolkowska, & Grönlund, 2019). This has benefited all sundry, particularly, organizations, and governments (Sharma, Metri, Dwivedi, & Rana, 2021). For instance, ITs have facilitated the search for information to improve decision making or facilitate services to consumers (Sabani, 2020). Despite these benefits, there is also evidence of their dissuasion to users' decisions due to the lack or inadequacy of information (Eijk, Asghari, Winter, & Narayanan, 2019). For example, information provided on some service platforms is either inadequate or difficult to understand in order to satisfy information needs of users (Tejedo-Romero & Araujo, 2020). This challenge of insufficient information needs of users often leads to the issue of limited information transparency (Abu-Shanab, 2013).

Information transparency is about the willingness to provide service and organizational information to users. Evidence suggests that information transparency positively correlates with disengagement behaviour (Choi, Park, & Jung, 2018). For example, The US department of commerce in 2017 found a low performance in e-commerce in the US despite the rapid growth experienced in e-commerce around the time and attributes its low levels of information transparency on commerce sites (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2017). Therefore, information transparency could be a relevant tool for ensuring sustained engagement and assurance online. Similarly, given the numerous concerns with privacy online, information transparency pertaining to user privacy could be used as a privacy assurance tool. Thus, willingly providing privacy-related information to users may ensure privacy assurance. This is described as privacy information transparency (Busch, Henriksen, & Øystein, 2018). Relative to e-government sites, readily offering various privacy information required by users to form appropriate protective behaviour or perception enhances privacy information transparency. This is important because e-government typifies information and technology applied to enhance transactional relationships between citizens (user) and its administrators (Ciborra, 2009). It also reengineers state administration's internal activities, which are to become more transparent, agile, and accountable (Bannister & Connolly, 2011). Therefore, increased privacy information transparency on e-government sends positive governance implications to the public or citizenry (Mutimukwe, Kolkowska, & Grönlund, 2017). Thus, the need to understand the extent of privacy information transparency in e-government (Gupta, Pal, & Muttoo, 2020). Further, scholars have questioned the effectiveness of information transparency on the whole, relative to its being an attribute of good governance (Mutimukwe et al., 2017; Millard, 2010; Meijer, Boersma, & Wagenaar, 2010).

This study considers privacy information aspects as one of the attributes of good governance because some gaps exist in this dimension in e-government. In 2010, the acquisition and public release of information from military files and certain diplomatic offices by Wikileaks in the US (New York Times, 2010) questioned the effectiveness of transparency onto the public domain. Subsequent releases, such as Facebook-Cambridge Analytica's case in 2016, further highlight user data collection in hindsight for several reasons like political advertising (Chan, 2020; Doffman, 2019). These phenomena increase concerns with state or government access to disclosed information of users, thus, making information transparency a touchy one (Choi et al., 2018). Where privacy information transparency is lacking, users are forced into the ‘black box’ of service providers (Choi et al., 2018) and may perceive no effective means of dealing with such information risks situation or engagement (Widjajaa, Jengchung, Sukococ, & Quang-An, 2019).

This may derive frustration and exhaustion with online risks and related tasks – also known as fatigue (Eijk et al., 2019). Fatigue arises from the inability to meet demands of a task, and it is characterized by emotional exhaustion and cynicism behaviour toward tasks (Hargittai & Marwick, 2016). Thus, emotional exhaustion and cynicism are core elements of fatigue (Choi et al., 2018). Fatigued people possess a reduced efficacy to make decisions due to the psychological strain from being unable to meet the demands of a task (Vohs et al., 2014). By implication, being faced with risks, like privacy-related risks or the task of protecting one's privacy, users can be driven into a state of hopelessness, frustration, or perpetual exhaustion (fatigue) because users here perceive no effective means of ensuring their privacy (Choi et al., 2018). This is conceptualized as privacy fatigue. Therefore, in the case of online privacy risks, a fatigued user, rather than seeking to ensure protective privacy behaviour, may withdraw or abandon the task of ensuring such protective behaviour online, which is the easy way out. This is because the user, experiencing privacy fatigue perceives no effective means of ensuring their privacy and will make little or no efforts to continue engagement on a platform they feel least protected or transparent. This behaviour is expressed through cynicism behaviour or emotional exhaustion toward privacy risks (Choi et al., 2018).

Despite this fact, users cannot quickly disengage entirely from e-government sites due to their mandatory structure. However, the manifestation of fatigue in e-government is likely to affect the transparency perception and user experience (Choi et al., 2018). Giving that anecdotal evidence supports the positive impacts of information transparency in the general information systems field (see, Abu-Shanab, 2013; Zhou, Weiquan, Xu, Liu, & Gu, 2018; Bol et al., 2018; Oulasvirta, Suomalainen, Hamari, Lampinen, & Karvonen, 2013), this study hypothesizes that information transparency reduces the likelihood of fatigue in e-government and positions the discussion on privacy information and privacy fatigue.

To better understand the effect of privacy information transparency and fatigue in e-government, it is appropriate that specific government activity must be excepted. With these cases out of the way, there is good reason for other routine aspects of e-government. These include data collection, processing and usage policy on other e-government portals be made available to users now that the ability to achieve this abounds and the issue of transparency in e-government has gained significant attention (Bearfield & Bowman, 2017).

Based on the above, and the fact that the phenomenon of privacy fatigue remains vastly unexplored in e-government, this study seeks to discern the information aspects of privacy information transparency in e-government and its impact on privacy fatigue expressed in the form of emotional exhaustion and cynicism behaviour from the perspective of the Consumer Service Life Cycle (CSLC) theory. Largely, it purses two objectives, (a) to investigate privacy information aspects that form the antecedents of privacy information transparency and (b) to examine the effect of privacy information transparency on privacy fatigue.