Assessing parent privacy awareness and coping appraisals in the adoption of child-monitoring technologies

Introduction Due to the serious privacy risks inherent in child-monitoring technologies, privacy implications should be a fundamental component of digital parenting guidelines. Several adoption studies indicate that privacy concerns are among the most influential criteria determining users’ intentions toward parental control applications (PCAs). However, the role of PCAs in enhancing children’s digital literacy and cybersecurity awareness remains largely unexamined. Therefore, this study extends protection motivation theory (PMT) to investigate how privacy awareness and coping/threat appraisals influence parents’ behavioral intentions toward PCA adoption. Methods To achieve this, we collected empirical survey data from a sample of 541 parents in Saudi Arabia who were recruited via random intercept sampling. A sophisticated, multistage data analysis framework was employed, combining partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), the PLSpredict algorithm, and artificial neural networks (ANNs) to capture both linear and non-linear psychological complexities. Results The findings show that privacy concerns significantly influence the behavioral intention to adopt PCAs. The results also indicate that privacy awareness, parental self-efficacy, perceived threat susceptibility, and perceived threat severity have significant effects on parents’ privacy concerns. However, the data do not support the hypothesized effect of assurance mechanisms efficacy (AME). These findings enhance our understanding of user mentality regarding the privacy dimensions of protective parenting software.