A rapidly changing environment requires intensive collaboration between teams in an organization. High mobility and cross-functional teams are best practices in creating agile organizations. Agility is needed to respond to very dynamic environmental changes.

The use of cloud-based storage (CBS) makes it easy for team members to contribute wherever they are without being bound by place and time. And the use of this service, such as Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud Drive, and/or Google Drive; is increasingly popular. Most of them use two or more CBS services, as a back-up effort if the main service used is down. Until mid-2018, there are 1,926 billion CBS users worldwide, both free-based and fee-based.

Many reports and studies reveal various problems related to the use of CBS, especially related to privacy and security of the data stored in it. Most of the research focused on the technical issues of CBS services, but studies that discuss user responses to privacy and security issues are rarely done. Using the Communication Privacy Management Theory, we conducted research with a comprehensive model to discuss it.

Communication Privacy Management Theory (CPMT)

CPMT was developed for the first time to explain and predict individuals in making decisions to disclose their personal information, especially in dealing with other people (interpersonal relationships). Of course, in the digital era facilitated by the internet, one person can connect not only with one other person but with internet users throughout the world. It is what makes the issue of privacy and security crucial. CPMT has three main components, privacy ownership, privacy control, and privacy turbulence.

We argue that users will be willing to place personal information, both information that is not very sensitive and very sensitive when they trust CBS services. Besides trust, of course, the benefits (personal interests and level of use) offered by CBS have made positive impacts on their willingness to reveal the information. The costs incurred ( related to privacy, the risk of privacy, and the level of information security) will have the opposite effect.

In this research, we also measure the level of control in the privacy and the costs incurred depending on the ability of CBS services to guarantee institutional privacy, institutional privacy assurances. This guarantee covers boundary coordination and boundary turbulence. When CBS services can provide an effective perception of the privacy policy, users will certainly have high privacy control. It will increase users’ trust in CBS services, so they will be willing to put their personal information into the service. We also argue that when regulations related to CBS services issued by the industry and government, users will be willing to keep their personal information because of the high level of privacy and trust they have.

Method and Results

This research is a collaboration between the National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan) and Universitas Airlangga. We also compare CBS service users in Taiwan and Indonesia due to differences in uncertainty avoidance scores on Hofstede’s dimensions. Furthermore, differences in the economic status of the two countries, the maturity of internet users will affect privacy concern, and government regulations related to personal privacy on the internet make this research also interesting.

We invite CBS service users and use a double-back translation for the questionnaires, both on Mandarin (for respondents in Taiwan) and Indonesian (for Indonesian respondents). During the first three months in 2017, there were 786 respondents (403 respondents from Taiwan and 383 from Indonesia) that was used in the analysis.  51.3% of respondents were private employees, while students were only 28.6% of the total respondents. More than half (50.5%) of the respondents have undergraduate education, while respondents with masters were 32.2%.  CBS services regular users are more than 50%, while 44.4% of users sometimes or rarely use them. Most users use Google Drive (54.3%), followed by Dropbox (22.1%), and Microsoft OneDrive (8.8%).

The results of the analysis are in line with the previous arguments. Interestingly, the influence of user perceptions on the effectiveness of government regulations on privacy control was very strong for respondents from Taiwan compared to Indonesia. The same thing also happened to the influence of users’ trust in CBS services, making respondents from Taiwan more willing to place personal information, either less and very sensitive, compared to Indonesia.

For CBS service companies, of course, providing comprehensive procedures and guarantees in securing privacy and security of users’ information is essential. Building trust and minimizing the perception of security risks on CBS services is a necessity. For companies that sell CBS services in Taiwan, it is important to understand that Taiwanese people have a high level of uncertainty avoidance. The user’s ability to fully control their privacy is the main step to increase trust in the offered services.

For the government, making regulations that protect the privacy of CBS service users and implement them (effective law enforcement) will make this industry grow even further.

Author: Prof. Badri Munir Sukoco, Ph.D

Details of this research available at:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563218304758

Andree E. Widjaja, Jengchung Victor Chen, Badri Munir Sukoco, and Quan-An Ha (2019). Understanding Users’ Willingness to Put Their Personal Information on the Personal Cloud-Based Storage Applications: An Empirical Study. Computers in Human Behavior, 91: 167-185; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.09.034