Perceived eavesdropping and its impact on personalised content and consumer privacy concerns : investigating the role of gender and operating system

Abstract

Technology has grown ubiquitous in today's society where devices such as the mobile phone or the computer have become essential in modern life. However, with such technology comes the persistent and common theory that they are secretly engaged in covert data collection for marketing purposes. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to assess consumers' views towards this notion of online privacy whilst investigating differences between the operating system adopted and gender. These objectives were met through a quantitative methodology where a questionnaire was distributed amongst 277 participants in Malta. The study concludes that perceived eavesdropping leads to higher privacy concerns than perceived personalised content and that there are no variations in privacy concerns between the operating system owned by the user and gender.