Susceptibility to social influence of privacy behaviors: Peer versus authoritative sources

Privacy in Online Social Networks (OSNs) is a dynamic concept, contingent on changes in technology and usage norms. Social influence is a major avenue for adopting online behaviors in general and privacy practices in particular. In this study, we examine how the source of influence affects the perceived behavioral intention to adopt privacy behavior. Our findings are based on a randomized experiment (167 U.S.-based Amazon Mechanical Turk workers) using a custom Facebook application that collects feedback from participants regarding their intention to adopt privacy practices from different types of sources, including authoritative organizations and Mends with varying tie strength correlative. Our results show that the source of social influence affects the susceptibility to adopt certain privacy behaviors and that there are different patterns of influence for security and privacy norms. More interestingly, susceptibility is modulated by the privacy perceptions of the user: users with high perceived behavioral control are more susceptible to peer influence. Additionally, we show that the intention to adopt privacy practices is correlated with the intention to further influence other people.