What drives the motivation to self-protect on social networks? The role of privacy concerns and perceived threats

Abstract

Social networks offer a wide range of services to their users resulting in a high degree of their involvement in social network users' everyday life. Users are however exposed to a variety of evolving cyberthreats that may be just as harmful as those in the material world even though they are sometimes hard to perceive as such in the cyberspace. To better understand the motivation of social network users to engage in self-protective behavior, we conducted an online survey among social network users (N = 227). The survey aimed to measure the role of perceived threat, privacy concerns and descriptive norms (also known as group norms) in user's intentions to adopt self-protective behavior. Analysis showed statistically significant correlations between mentioned constructs confirming most of our hypotheses. In addition to the well-known importance of perceived threat, results show that privacy concerns are also an important factor in explaining the intention of social network users to engage in self-protective behavior on social networks.