The Impact s of Requested Permission on Mobile App Adoption: The Insights Based on an Experiment in Taiwan

Due to the popularity of smartphones, the number of apps has been growing up rapidly. Users have to grant requested permissions before downloading apps. However, some apps may request more permissions than they need. It may cause the concern of security or privacy. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of requested permissions on users' intention to install mobile apps. We developed the proposed proposal by embedding the social exchange theory into technology acceptance model plus the concept of permission-function fit, perceived privacy-level and perceived privacy risk. We validated the proposed hypotheses with data collected from 389 smartphone users by using experimental design approach. The findings include (1) Users' attitude toward the app positively influences their download intention. (2) Users' perceived usefulness and the ranking of the app positively influence users' attitude toward the app while perceived privacy risk negatively affects users' attitude. Further, if the app requests more permissions than it needs, users have a negative attitude toward it. Overall, perceived usefulness has the strongest effect on attitude. (3) The privacy-level of the requested permissions positively affects users' perception of privacy risk. In addition, if there are over-requested permissions, users perceive higher privacy risk.