Are You Tired? I am: Trying to Understand Privacy Fatigue of Social Media Users

Abstract

Privacy fatigue is a new perspective to explain the discrepancy between individual attitude and behavior, i.e., privacy paradox. Fatigued users are powerless about privacy decisions, and thus ”forced to accept” or ”regardless of it”. In order to understand social media users’ privacy fatigue comprehensively, we use China’s mainstream social media Weibo as the background to conduct experiments on 428 users. Specifically, we propose and verify the perceived antecedents and behavioral consequences of the privacy fatigue model based on the Stimulus Organism Response (S-O-R) theory, taking personality traits as the moderating factor. Based on collectivist culture, the study provides complementary evidence to existing research on cultural factors. We hope it will enrich the privacy fatigue theory, helping researchers and service providers pay attention to users’ potential fatigue and implement usable privacy design in real systems to alleviate privacy fatigue.