‘DON’T FOOL ME, AS IT IS YOUR LOSS’ - IMPACT OF DECEPTION ON INFORMATION PRIVACY

ABSTRACT

With the explosion of e-commerce, the potential for new internet portals to mislead or fool consumers has grown significantly. This study investigates the influence of these deceptive actions on customer privacy and their information-sharing behavior. We have used online experimental research to demonstrate the influence of deception on information privacy and information-sharing behavior. We demonstrate that misleading activities such as falsification, concealment and equivocation reduce customers’ trust in the platform and increase their privacy concerns, resulting in a lower willingness to disclose any information on the platforms. We further explain the impact of several types of deceptive tactics in the online purchasing environment and present a mediation model to understand the impact of deception. The study has implications for category managers and consumers of e-commerce platforms.

KEYWORDS:

• Privacy
• deception
• ecommerce
• internet trust
• falsification
• equivocation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abhishek Kumar Jha

Abhishek Kumar Jha is a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Management Indore, India. His research primarily focuses on the behavioral side of technology in areas like Information Privacy, Technology Adoption, and Human Machine Interaction.

Saurabh Kumar

Saurabh Kumar is a Faculty at the Indian Institute of Management Indore, India. His research focuses on Data mining, Predictive analytics and Information Privacy.