Exploring the influence of privacy control designs on users' interpersonal trust in online social network environments

Over more than a decade, IS research has examined the role of trust in the context of technology adoptions, such as website acceptance (Gefen et al. 2003), successful online interactions (Coppola et al. 2004) and recommendation agent usage (Wang and Benbasat 2005). The primary antecedent of trust in this line of research is trustee’s trustworthiness. However, Dashiti et al. (2011) articulated the effect of trust- received (trustor’s felt trust from trustee) on trust-given (trustor’s trust in trustee) and consequently the trusting behaviors in the e-government context. This study aims to investigate the context of online social networks (OSNs) and to test whether trust-received plays a similar role in forming the interpersonal trust among Facebook user’s interactions. Based on this trust reciprocity theory, this study aims to find out (i) whether users are more willing to trust others and share their personal information with them when individuals experienced trust-received and (ii) what factors, especially what IT features, influence trust-received in personal networking context. We hypothesize that information sensitivity and audience limitation are two main influencing factors over users’ trust-received on Facebook. We analyzed our hypotheses using an online scenario-based survey, and based on our findings we proposed a new IT artifact in the follow-up study to explore more trust-received influencing factors. We found that audience limitation (an IT artifact) has the most significant impact over trust-received and that reciprocity of trust does exist on Facebook. We also concluded that the mentioning of a virtual function in which the re-share could be switched on or off has an effect over trust-received under certain circumstances. Thus we concluded that IT artifacts can help build or maintain online users relationships and that trust can form from a reciprocity pattern.Business, Sauder School ofGraduat