6. Discussion
The primary purpose of this study was to elucidate the concept of online privacy fatigue. For the objective, the study conceptualized privacy fatigue as an individual psychological phenomenon and developed a set of measures to assess it. The developed scale is an instrument that captures the multidimensional characteristics of privacy fatigue, including emotional exhaustion and cynicism. In addition, the study examined the effects of privacy fatigue on coping behaviors, and demonstrated that privacy fatigue is an important factor in understanding users’ information behaviors in online environments. Specifically, the results showed that privacy fatigue had more significant and intense impacts on users’ disclosure intention and users’ disengagement than privacy concern. Such results extend previous discourse on psychological fatigue of users with respect to online privacy by empirically assessing the impact of privacy fatigue on their behaviors.
The findings confirmed that individuals with high levels of privacy concern were more likely to take action to protect their privacy rights. On the other hand, privacy fatigue had a positive impact on disclosure of personal information and disengagement. This result demonstrates that users with more privacy fatigue tend to put less effort into making privacy decisions (Stanton, Theofanos, Prettyman, & Furman, 2016), and that privacy fatigue has a particularly strong effect on disengagement behavior. People with high levels of privacy fatigue are more likely to “do nothing” in response to the misuse of their personal information. On the whole, this study supported the significant role of privacy fatigue in users’ online privacy behaviors.
