Antecedents of networked privacy and access technologies in social network media: An empirical study of users’ perceptions and their online marketing implications

Abstract

The Social media represents, without a doubt, the most important avenue of communication on the modern Internet and the foremost tool of Web 2.0 technology. Its roots can be found in the ancient groupware technology, but its modern applications are beyond anything those users of old could have imagined. In recent years, it has morphed yet again, incorporating the prevalent new mobile technology as its delivery mechanism. The term “social media”, coined by Chris Shipley, includes the sum of the online tools and utilities that allow communication, participation and collaboration, including blogs and micro-blogs, social networking sites, wikis, podcasts and videocasts, social bookmarking and virtual worlds. At the end of 2015, over 2 billion users worldwide could access social media accounts and interact with one another on mobile phones, thus generating a wealth of data to be mined by marketers all over the world. However, this unprecedented access to consumer data (in conjunction with multiple user connections) has raised a number of privacy concerns, which have only grown in the last few years. This paper, detailing a study conducted for over a year on a wide variety of subjects, aims at interdisciplinary development of a clustering model based on both usage and perception variables, coupled with various psychographic predictor items, such as users’ attitude towards social media, users’ utilitarian and hedonic motivation, normative beliefs, perceived self-efficacy, various lifestyle variables, as well as overall trust and perception of privacy-associated risks. The proposed model is developed using discriminant analysis and it allows us to put forward four different user groups in terms of privacy concerns over social media. The management implications of our findings are also discussed and innovative ways proposed to deal with the ethical issues associated with the ever-growing lack of online privacy. © 2018, Czestochowa University of Technology. All rights reserved.