Abstract
Despite prevalent privacy and security threats on the cloud, users have put tremendous amounts of their personal information on cloud storage. This present study proposes a comprehensive research framework to investigate cloud storage users' willingness to put personal information on personal cloud-based storage applications. Our research framework is theoretically derived from the Communication Privacy Management Theory and Privacy-Trust-Behavioral Intention Model. To empirically test our research framework, we conducted an online survey of 786 active cloud storage users both in Indonesia and Taiwan. The findings suggest that cloud storage users' willingness to put personal information is highly influenced by trust, perceived costs, perceived benefits, and also the degree of sensitivity of the personal information. Some findings with regard to cultural differences between the two countries are also showed out. The key findings, implications, and limitations are discussed in this paper.
1. Introduction
Cloud storage has been widely used as online storage virtualization by many people in around the globe. As in 2018, cloud storage users have reached around 1.926 billion users (Statista, 2018) and up to now tremendous amount of data has been put onto the cloud, including the sensitive one (Kohgadai, 2018). However, since the data is digitally recorded on the cloud, users may lose control over their data, and consequently, privacy and security concerns, as well as privacy risks may be raised. Users may not exactly know what will happen to their data, and whether cloud storage providers will keep their data safe or use it for their own benefits.
7. Conclusions
Drawing from CPMT and the Privacy-Trust-Behavioral Intention Model, we developed a research framework to empirically investigate users’ willingness to put personal information onto cloud storage. We tested our research framework in both Indonesia and Taiwan. The findings suggest that trust, perceived cost, and perceived benefit are the main factors affecting users’ willingness. We found that perceived cost is more apparent when users put more sensitive personal information than less sensitive personal information onto cloud storage. This strongly indicates that users’ privacy and security concerns are actually being addressed in regard to sensitive personal information only. Meanwhile, since perceived benefit is far greater than perceived cost, users may not be concerned that much when putting less sensitive personal information onto cloud storage.
