Willingness to provide personal information: Perspective of privacy calculus in IoT services

Recent developments in the Internet of Things (IoT) technology provide an unprecedented opportunity for personalized services. To take advantage of this great potential, consumers are willing to provide their personal information at the risk of privacy breach. This paper examines factors affecting the willingness to provide privacy information based on the privacy calculus theory in several IoT services; healthcare, smart home and smart transportation. The proposed model is estimated using survey data collected from 154 people who know the concept of IoT. The results indicate that people do not pay much attention to perceived privacy risk when providing privacy information for a better personalized service. However, in healthcare service, where perceived privacy risk is high, people are not willing to provide their personal information despite the lower expected value from incomplete personalization. Analysis of privacy behavior in the context of IoT services provides implications for and insight into the tradeoff decision between perceived privacy risk and willingness to provide personal information.