Coping with Information Privacy Breaches: An Exploratory Framework

The increasing number of information privacy breaches undertaken by IT companies and the reliance of different governmental regulatory regimes on complaints to initiate privacy breach investigations point to the need for better understanding the factors that influence the behaviors of those who perceive themselves to have been victims of information privacy breaches. Given that little research has examined the behavioral and emotional reactions of information privacy breach victims, the present study develops a research framework that is based on coping theory. The framework identifies individual and environmental factors whose different configurations are hypothesized to influence the reactions of individual privacy breach victims. We propose to use Qualitative Comparative Analysis as an analytical approach to examine how different configurations of factors identified in the proposed framework influence different coping instances of privacy breach victims.