Danger vs Fear: An Empirical Study on Wearable Users' Privacy Coping

With the arrival of Internet of Things, the magnitude of data shared through various devices has seen a drastic increase. Fitness trackers contribute to a significant part of this phenomenon. Increase in collection of individual's information has led to increase in privacy issues like identity theft and targeted marketing. This study treats information privacy as a distinct dimension and develops a model, drawing from extant privacy concern literature, Extended Parallel Process Model and coping theory to understand an individual's coping behavior when faced with a privacy breach to their user generated health data. The model is empirically tested by conducting a sample survey with 225 fitness tracker users. Our findings show that increased privacy concern increases threat perceptions, which has a major impact on an individual's coping behavior. The major contribution of this study is towards the understanding of the impact of fear over loss of one's health-data privacy and the resulting shift in the attitude towards the technology itself. Theoretically this study extends fear appeals theory to information privacy by incorporating the role of individual's privacy concern. This study implies that manufacturers and policy makers in healthcare domain need to re-examine privacy and data processing policies keeping in mind potential consumer privacy concerns.