Snap. Share. (Don’t) Care? Ephemerality, Privacy Concerns, and The Use of Ephemeral Social Network Sites

Active participation is crucial for any successful social network site. However, privacy concerns may keep individuals from actively using these networks. Ephemerality—a new technical feature—may counteract privacy concerns while driving active usage. The recent success of ephemeral social network sites (ESNS) which build on ephemerality presumably owes to this technical peculiarity. Despite its high practical relevance, little is known about the concept of ephemerality and about how it affects ESNS usage intention. In this paper, we investigate the effect of ephemerality on two crucial determinants of ESNS usage—privacy concerns and enjoyment—and ultimately on the intention to use an ESNS. Drawing on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework and the privacy calculus approach, we develop a research model and test it based on an online survey with 429 participants. We find that perceived ephemerality drives individuals’ ESNS usage intentions by lowering privacy concerns while raising perceived enjoyment