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Is Contact Tracing for Pandemic Relief or Privacy Menace?: a Lens of Dual-Calculus Decision

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Abstract

South Korea endured early outbreaks and flattened the coronavirus curve without paralyzing economic systems. The critical factor that leads to the policy’s success is contact tracing using personal information. However, at the same time, the extensive use of personal information has raised social problems related to privacy loss. Even in devastating pandemics, balancing personal privacy and public safety remains a crucial issue. Thus, this study attempted to gain a deeper understanding of privacy disclosure for restaurant customers. We applied privacy calculus theory and risk-risk trade-off concepts to explain the relationship between two conflicting risks. i.e., privacy risk and health risk. We found that “risk substitutions” provide implications for how customers’ privacy perceptions change with the level of health risk and the importance of perceived benefit. Finally, we verified that institutional privacy protection directly influences disclosure intention. This study has implications for theory and practice.

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Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are analyzed from the authors’ survey, and the data for all analyses is available upon request.

Notes

  1. Since the late 1990s, concerns have been raised regarding the “dossier effect” that collecting a large number of innocuous data points could easily be de-anonymized and create a combined dataset with a startling amount of personal.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Smart Tourism Education Platform (STEP), Kyung Hee University, Kyung Hee Dearo 26, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Eunji Lee & Chulmo Koo

  2. Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

    Chul Woo Yoo & Jahyun Goo

  3. School of Business Administration, Department of Marketing and Information Systems, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

    Kichan Nam

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  1. Eunji Lee
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Table 5.

Table 5 Operational definitions and survey items
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Lee, E., Yoo, C.W., Goo, J. et al. Is Contact Tracing for Pandemic Relief or Privacy Menace?: a Lens of Dual-Calculus Decision. Inf Syst Front (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-023-10420-7

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