Conceptualizing the Impact of Digital Business Models on Privacy Concerns

Abstract

Digital technologies have enabled novel forms and reconfigurations of value creation, delivery, and capture. These new reconfigurations challenge the conventional notion of value creation with digital business models. On that premise, the widening of privacy concerns, alert us that organizations of the elite digital, like Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify, design technology to feed on personal data, based on algorithmic profiling capabilities. Then, privacy itself becomes their digital business model. In this paper we conceptualize the impact of digital business models on privacy concerns, by presenting a focused literature review that presents 4 waves of research on understanding privacy from the context of digital business models. With our initial findings, we recommend that future technological development should pay central attention to privacy-preserving digital business models, by making it possible that data privacy is envisioned with the right safeguards, targeting 'invisibility' of the user.