How pull vs. push information delivery and social proof affect information disclosure in location based services

Abstract

With the boom of the app economy, users’ location information has become an increasingly valuable differentiator to deliver personalized products and services, yet continues to raise severe privacy concerns. While research on information privacy has paid great attention on explaining and predicting factors of information disclosure decisions, there is still a significant gap in terms of how app providers can combine different mechanisms in the design of their apps to effectuate better disclosure outcomes. Drawing on a randomized online experiment with 143 smartphone users, we analyze how pull (i.e., services with user-controlled position awareness) and push (i.e., demanding always-on access location tracking) information delivery and social proof cues separately and jointly affect users’ actual location information disclosure. The results reveal that both strategies increase actual location information disclosure via two distinct mediation paths. While pull information delivery mitigates users’ privacy concerns, social proof increases their trusting beliefs. However, when both strategies are employed together, we found that social proof overrides the effect of pull information delivery mechanisms.