What Do I Do? Uncovering Fitness Tracker Users’ Privacy Coping Strategy

In the past year, reports suggest there were as many as 726 million cyber-attacks on all forms of technology ranging from video games to the hospitality and aviation industries. Concerns about data privacy of fitness tracking devices is on the rise. Technology companies can benefit from understanding the different coping strategies users might undertake in case of a personal fitness information breach. To date, privacy research on the effects of fear appeals manipulation on an individual’s threat perception to understand their coping strategy is scarce. We aim to fill this research gap by drawing on the core concepts of Protection Motivation Theory, Coping Theory, and few self-schema constructs. We have conducted an experiment to validate the causal effects of threat and efficacy perception on coping. Further, we conducted a survey to validate our measurement model using structural equation modelling. The findings from this study contribute to practice by shedding light on the importance of privacy to users and how concerns can influence the actual use of fitness tracking technologies