How Privacy Concerns and Trust and Risk Beliefs Influence Users' Intentions to Use Privacy-Enhancing Technologies - The Case of Tor

Due to an increasing collection of personal data by internet companies and several data breaches, research related to privacy gained importance in the last years in the information systems domain. Privacy concerns can strongly influence users’ decision to use a service. The Internet Users Information Privacy Concerns (IUIPC) construct is one operationalization to measure the impact of privacy concerns on the use of technologies. However, when applied to a privacy enhancing technology (PET) such as an anonymization service the original rationales do not hold anymore. In particular, an inverted impact of trusting and risk beliefs on behavioral intentions can be expected. We show that the IUIPC model needs to be adapted for the case of PETs. In addition, we extend the original causal model by including trust beliefs in the anonymization service itself. A survey among 124 users of the anonymization service Tor shows that they have a significant effect on the actual use behavior of the PET.

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