DRAWBACKS OF ONLINE RELATIONSHIPS: TRUST AND PRIVACY CONCERNS OVER SOCIAL MEDIA WEBSITES

There is a big interest shown in studies regarding the privacy concerns and trust issues of Internet users related to electronic commerce and monetary transaction, e-mail marketing campaigns or the way websites use personal information. Our study proposes a research model for the investigation of users’ intention to continue disclosing personal information on social networking sites, in the general context of the exponential growth of online social network users and the weak literature which covers the area of their privacy concerns of information disclosure intentions. The model was validated through an empirical research, which yielded, amongst a few interesting outcomes, the fact that social network users’ intention to continue disclosing personal information is strongly related to their privacy concerns and trust over social media websites. The effect of perceived risks of information disclosure and perceived benefits of using online social networks on information disclosure was also analyzed. A construct regarding users’ willingness to have personal information used in their advantage was developed for this study, and the other variables impact on it was examined. The moderating effect of risk aversion on the risk – trust relationship was also discussed. We demonstrate that privacy and trust remain the main predictors in online social media users’ behavior, having the strongest influence on their usage and information disclosure intention. Also, respondents that perceive a series of risks associated to information disclosure and have privacy concerns will be reticent in disclosing personal information on social media websites.