The Role of Privacy Fatigue in Privacy Paradox: A PSM and Heterogeneity Analysis

Powerful rising trends of mobile media platforms have also resulted in the escalation of users’ privacy concerns. However, there is a paradox between users’ attitudes towards privacy and their actual privacy disclosure behaviors. This study attempts to explain the phenomenon of privacy paradox in the mobile social media context from the privacy fatigue perspective. Based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and employing the method of Propensity Score Matching (PSM), this paper confirmed that privacy fatigue could directly explain the privacy paradox. Among the findings, cynicism turned the relationship between privacy concern and privacy protection behaviors from positive influence to negative influence, while emotional exhaustion would weaken the positive influence relationship between privacy concern and the intention to undertake privacy protection behaviors. In addition, the study also revealed the heterogeneous effects of individual characteristics and usage characteristics variables on how the privacy fatigue influences privacy paradox.