Research on the influence of fear appeals on APP users' privacy protection behavior

This paper builds a model based on the fear appeals, and explores the factors influencing the willingness of APP users with different experience groups to actively adopt privacy security protection behaviors. 387 samples were collected by questionnaire survey, and path analysis was carried out by using structural equation model to explore the influence mechanism of fear appeals on privacy protection behavior of APP users. We found that perceived threat severity has a positive effect on the self-efficacy, fear and response efficacy of APP users; perceived threat susceptibility has a negative effect on self-efficacy, and it has a positive effect on fear emotion and no significant effect on response efficacy. We also found that there were differences in the influencing factors between groups of users with or without experience in APP privacy protection. This study has certain reference significance for APP operators and service providers providing third-party network security.

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