An Agentic Perspective on Privacy Choices: Enhancing Awareness of Control through Privacy Verification Agent

This proposed study aims to understand users’ mobile app choices when their awareness of control is augmented by a privacy verification agent. Drawing on the agency theory as the overarching framework, we plan to focus on two key forms of control agency, namely profile acquisition and security conformity. Further, we postulate that the two forms of control agency will influence the formulation of transactional privacy concerns, which in turn, drive the likelihood to install mobile app. Following the spirit of the privacy literature, we posit that the impact of control agency on transactional privacy concerns will be shaped by users’ dispositional privacy concerns. We plan to operationalize the research model by conducting a laboratory experiment in which subjects will be instructed to evaluate a hypothetical app, which is attached with various profile acquisition and security conformity scores reported by the privacy verification agent, using their own smartphones. Expected implications are discussed.