An Empirical Study of Privacy Concern and Trust in the Decision to Revisit Personalized Social Networking Websites

Social networking websites adopt personalization to cater to users’ needs to serve better are widely researched, but little is known about privacy concerns of the user and trust affecting user's decision making to revisit with personalized social networking websites. This research develops a parsimonious model to predict users’ intention to revisit social networking websites using personalization as a result of the trade-off between information personalization, control, trust, and privacy concern. In addition to this trade-off, the research identified that a users’ intent to use personalized services is positively influenced by trust toward SN websites. Our findings suggest that firstly, SN websites can improve their abilities to acquire and use users’ information through trust-building with highly relevant personalized information; secondly, it is of critical importance to understand the value of privacy of users and provide more control to the users for personalized service.