The Influence Mechanism Of Privacy Policies On Consumer's Willingness To Provide Information

E-commerce brings convenience for consumers,but it also makes the consumers' personal information leakage occur frequently simultaneously.What seriously affects the security of personal privacy information and transaction,and hinders the healthy and rapid development of electronic commerce.A variety of measures have been taken to protect the consumers' online personal information all over the world.The mode of self-regulation in America and legal norms in Europe have been achieved certain success.However,due to the lack of relevant laws of individual information protection and independent third-party certification organizations in our country,the companies usually post privacy policies on their website.So this paper aims to put forward some suggestions about how to establish sound and effective online privacy policies to contribute to defend consumers from attack and promote the development of e-commerce through analyzing the content of online privacy policies that e-commerce businesses generally use.This paper firstly reviews and summarize the literatures on the consumers' willingness to provide personal information and the contents of online privacy policies at home and abroad,and then based on the signaling theory and Communication Privacy Management,it examines how the contents of online privacy policies influence the consumers'willingness to provide personal information and the moderating effects of information sensitivity through three between-subjects experimental designs.The results demonstrated that the notification clarity,permissiveness and protection degrees offered by privacy policies have significant impacts on consumers' perceived information control and perceived privacy risk;and information sensitivity moderates the correlation between permissiveness,protection degrees offered by a privacy policy and consumers' perceptions.The results also reveal notification clarity' impact on consumers' perceptions exhibits no significant difference between high sensitive information and low sensitive information.The theoretical contributions of this research are as follows:firstly,focused on the content of online privacy policy at the backdrop of integrity issues during the development of e-commerce,the research divide the online privacy policy into three dimensions:the notification clarity of information processing,consumers' permissiveness and information protection degrees,and explore its impact on consumers'perception.Secondly,this paper considers the privacy policy's impact on consumers' willingness to provide personal information as a black box,and carefully dissects its influence mechanism,further promotes the development of the online privacy policy's influence on consumer online privacy behavior.Thirdly,combined with CPM,the research considers the online trading information types that is generally ignored by past research,and reveals the relationship among online privacy policy,consumers' perception and information sensitivity,which establishes a theoretical foundation for continue study work.