Privacy as a Tradeoff: Introducing the Notion of Privacy Calculus for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

Evidences collected from smartphones users show a growing desire of personalization offered by services for mobile devices. However, the need to accurately identify users' contexts has important implications for user's privacy and it increases the amount of trust, which users are requested to have in the service providers. In this paper, we introduce a model that describes the role of personalization and control in users' assessment of cost and benefits associated to the disclosure of private information. We present an instantiation of such model, a context-aware application for smartphones based on the Android operating system, in which users' private information are protected. Focus group interviews were conducted to examine users' privacy concerns before and after having used our application. Obtained results confirm the utility of our artifact and provide support to our theoretical model, which extends previous literature on privacy calculus and user's acceptance of context-aware technology.