Revisiting APCO

Abstract

Imagine that you are a product manager at a software company. When users disclose some information to your product, they can use all the great features you and your team have integrated into the software. Utilizing these features is essential for the success of your product: it makes users satisfied and encourages others to use the software as well. Furthermore, the user and usage data can be used to improve the product and help implementing new features over time. However, since your product collects users' data, you are worried about privacy-related issues. What causes users' privacy concerns, and what are the potential consequences of those concerns? The APCO (Antecedents → Privacy Concerns → Outcomes) and enhanced APCO models provide a summary of the current scientific findings related to these questions and present them in a conceptual model. The APCO framework will help practitioners and scholars to bring different privacy-related aspects of a product to their attention and suggests how these aspects can interrelate. Throughout this chapter, we will consider a use case scenario of a fitness tracker application and discuss how APCO applies to this scenario.