Investigating Chinese Tourists’ Privacy Perceptions and Management of Smart Technology Applications in Tourism

Tourism with smart technology applications (STAs) create an interconnected tourism ecosystem where technologies interact across scenarios. This ecosystem is shaped by tourists' shifting roles and changing control over smart technologies. However, existing research examines privacy concerns in isolated scenarios, overlooking how privacy perceptions and management evolve across interconnected tourism contexts and role changes. To address this gap, we investigate how technological interconnections and shifting roles shape tourists' privacy perceptions and management. Guided by Contextual Integrity (CI), we conduct an explanatory sequential mixed-methods study in China, including a survey (n=308) across five tourism scenarios and follow-up interviews (n=15). Findings show that tourists’ privacy awareness is speculative and post-hoc, whereas concerns are experience-driven, creating privacy risks in STAs. Tourists prefer consistent privacy management strategies, but these fail to align with their shifting roles. We identify characteristics of tourism STAs that challenge privacy management and derive design implications for consistent, controllable, context-adaptive privacy support.