What Affects the Value of Information Privacy on SNS?

Abstract

The dramatic growth of social networking sites (SNS) has created a myriad of privacy concerns. Our study focuses on how much monetary incentive SNS users are willing to accept in exchange for disclosing their SNS information by accepting friend requests. First, we focused on information privacy in SNS, and estimated the value of information privacy by using the contingent valuation method. Second, we attempted to estimate how SNS users’ willingness to accept would change when demographic information and additional information vary. Privacy-sensitive SNS users have the following characteristics: higher education, less SNS experience, and higher security consciousness. On the contrary, those who make good use of SNS and use open-based SNS are less sensitive to privacy. In summary, privacy-sensitive SNS users are fearful or uneasy when they have insufficient control of SNS information. Considering 14 conditions on the value of information privacy on SNS, the mean value of SNS information per person is 173,957 won. If we apply this value to Facebook users, the total Facebook information value would be 1.91 trillion won, considering that there are 11 million users in Korea.