A Study of the Effect of Privacy Assurance Mechanisms on Self-disclosure in Social Networking Sites from the View of Protection Motivation Theory

Because of the predominant and rampant of social networking sites (SNSs), users’ information privacy issue becomes an important challenge not only for SNS users but also for the SNS service providers and governing organizations. This study’s objectives are: (1) to study how assurance mechanisms affect SNS users’ self-disclosure intention by applying protection motivation theory (PMT), and (2) to empirically test the perceived privacy concern as part of the PMT in order to predict self-disclosure on SNS. There are a number of expected contributions for this study. First, this study applies PMT in order to understand how assurance mechanisms applied by SNSs affect users to disclose their personal information. Second, we introduce the customizing privacy as an assurance mechanism which has not been studied in previous literature. Finally, we consider fear component of PMT which has not been studied by previous researchers who applied PMT in this context