Consumers’ Privacy Concern and Privacy Protection on Social Network Sites in the Era of Big Data: Empirical Evidence from College Students

Information privacy and disclosure have been prominent issues revolving around social media. We adopted communication privacy management theory, the persuasion knowledge model, and the technology acceptance model and conducted a survey with 526 subjects and examined their privacy management on Facebook and the conditions upon which their decision to reveal or withhold private information was contingent. The results showed that consumers set up different privacy boundaries for different types of personal information. Social identity information and daily life and entertainment information tended to be shared more freely, while personal contact information was mostly withheld. Knowledge of and concern regarding technology ubiquity and companies’ business strategies involving big data were the strongest predictors of privacy protection behavior and privacy settings on Facebook. Online trust and Facebook intensity also interacted and jointly predicted privacy concerns. This study brought to researchers’ attention how big data are being used by marketers to target consumers.