Bring-in Privacy Provisions but Shape-up Attitude Too: Building Privacy Experience in Mobile Platform Ecosystem

Privacy management in mobile ecosystems is a complex interplay of technology and user behavior. This study investigates the influence of users’ mobile skills, privacy awareness, and attitudinal dispositions on their capacity to safeguard personal information, from a socio-technical perspective. Using affordance and effective use theories, we explore how users’ mental models of these factors shape their interactions with privacy provisions. Through a survey of 160 mobile users across three economies, we explore their perceptions and actions regarding privacy affordances in the mobile platform ecosystem. Our findings underscore the critical role of mobile skills in utilizing privacy features, implying the importance of privacy-by-default as a policy and highlighting that designs should accommodate varying levels of user technical proficiency. Although prior research frequently suggests a direct influence of privacy awareness on user action, our findings highlight a more intricate relationship. We find that users’ dynamic and evolving privacy attitudes are a critical determinant in whether awareness translates into privacy behavior. We contribute to the literature by operationalizing privacy affordances through the development of measurement scales and testing the proposed model through structured equation modeling. Our analysis provides actionable directions and design perspectives for privacy provisions, such as emphasizing design consistency for effective controls, contextualizing privacy decisions, simplifying privacy language for effective user interaction, building trust through transparency, and providing intuitive and accessible provisions to enhance user privacy experience in mobile platform ecosystems.