Privacy Concerns and Acceptance of IoT Services

Internet of Things (IoT) services provide new privacy challenges in our everyday life. Although privacy research has been addressed to a great extent in the Information Systems discipline, there still exists no robust instrument for the evaluation of IoT services. The contribution of this chapter is therefore to propose and test such an instrument in order to provide policy makers, IT developers and IS researchers with recommendations on how to design privacy-aware IoT services. The current research is based on utility maximization theory and integrates theoretical constructs from the Extended Privacy Calculus Model and the Technology Acceptance Model. An empirical study with 92 subjects is conducted to test this instrument. Results indicate that the acceptance of IoT services is influenced by various contradicting factors such as perceived privacy risks and personal interests. It is further assumed that legislation, data security and transparency of information influences the adoption behaviour. Further research will focus on these factors to enable the development of useful and secure IoT services in the very near future.