The Impact of Privacy Control on Users' Intention to Use Smart Home Internet of Things (IoT) Services

Abstract

Despite the diverse benefits of smart home Internet of Things (IoT) services, the biggest obstacle to the actual usage of those services is concern about privacy. However, little research has investigated the impact of privacy control on users' intention to use smart home services. Based on communication privacy management theory and privacy calculus theory, this study investigates how privacy control options affect users' perceived benefits and costs and how those perceptions affect individuals’ intentions to use smart home services by conducting an experiment. Our results showed that smart home privacy control options decreased perceived benefits and increased perceived costs. The perceived benefits and costs significantly affected the intention to use smart home security services. More intriguingly, the effect of perceived benefit was found to be stronger than that of the expected cost. This research contributes to the field of IoT and smart home research and provides practitioners with notable guidelines.