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

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.