Negative Online experiences [03.12.20]
Experience is a resource of knowledge and is therefore also an important antecedent for attitudes and behavior. How does it impact individuals when their online information is collected and exploited by institutions or companies? The recently published article examines this transformative characteristics of experiences with online privacy violations.
Sharing private information, credit card fraud, identity theft – in online environments individuals face a variety of potential privacy violations. In the offline world, people learn through their experiences which environments can provide high or low privacy. In online environments, on the other hand, such an assessment is more difficult, since instead of physical privacy, informational and psychological privacy play a more important role. Our new study has been published, researching the transformative characteristics of privacy violation experiences for online privacy concerns and behavior. The results show that negative experiences increase privacy concerns to a certain extent, but this does not necessarily transfer to a person’s behavior. In addition, the article detects relevant differences for the within- and between-person perspective, which have not been considered much in research so far. The exciting results on online privacy and experiences are now available in the journal Human Communication Research.
