The Sky is Falling, UTAUT Has Failed! An Investigation of the Adoption of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs)

IF 6.9 3区管理学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Information Systems Frontiers Pub Date : 2025-05-24 DOI:10.1007/s10796-025-10607-0

Christine Abdalla Mikhaeil, Raji Raman, Tabitha L. James, Viswanath Venkatesh

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

In the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and data-hungry applications, privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) offer a way for individuals to limit data collection and processing by these applications. Yet, the adoption of PETs remains low and user-focused research on adoption predictors is limited. In this work, we use the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2) to study the adoption of five categories of personal PETs: private browsing, privacy-focused web browsers, privacy browser extensions, secure (encrypted) messaging, and secure (encrypted) email. Our results confirmed the significant role of social influence and habit as predictors of adoption of PETs but also showed that the adoption of these five categories of PETs was not driven by the same set of factors. These differences call for more contextualized research to study the adoption of PETs and raise the potential issue of the limits of the generalizability of UTAUT2. The discovery of the lack of support for such an established theory also creates the potential for breaking new ground through the development of new theories of adoption that are better suited to the emerging world of technologies including PETs.

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天要塌了，太空站失败了！采用增强私隐技术的调查

在人工智能（AI）和数据密集型应用程序的时代，隐私增强技术（pet）为个人提供了一种限制这些应用程序收集和处理数据的方法。然而，pet的采用率仍然很低，以用户为中心的采用率预测研究也很有限。在这项工作中，我们使用接受和使用技术2的统一理论（UTAUT2）来研究五类个人宠物的采用情况：私人浏览、以隐私为中心的web浏览器、隐私浏览器扩展、安全（加密）消息传递和安全（加密）电子邮件。我们的研究结果证实了社会影响和习惯作为宠物采用的重要预测因素，但也表明这五类宠物的采用并不是由同一组因素驱动的。这些差异需要更多的情境化研究来研究pet的采用，并提出UTAUT2推广局限性的潜在问题。发现缺乏对这样一个既定理论的支持，也创造了通过发展更适合包括pet在内的新兴技术世界的新的采用理论来开辟新天地的潜力。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Information Systems Frontiers 工程技术-计算机：理论方法

CiteScore

13.30

自引率

18.60%

发文量

127

审稿时长

9 months

期刊介绍： The interdisciplinary interfaces of Information Systems (IS) are fast emerging as defining areas of research and development in IS. These developments are largely due to the transformation of Information Technology (IT) towards networked worlds and its effects on global communications and economies. While these developments are shaping the way information is used in all forms of human enterprise, they are also setting the tone and pace of information systems of the future. The major advances in IT such as client/server systems, the Internet and the desktop/multimedia computing revolution, for example, have led to numerous important vistas of research and development with considerable practical impact and academic significance. While the industry seeks to develop high performance IS/IT solutions to a variety of contemporary information support needs, academia looks to extend the reach of IS technology into new application domains. Information Systems Frontiers (ISF) aims to provide a common forum of dissemination of frontline industrial developments of substantial academic value and pioneering academic research of significant practical impact.