Observed Gender Differences in Privacy Concerns and Behaviors of Mobile Device End Users

Sustaining privacy and trust is paramount in the e-Health industry between service providers and their end users. This work provides a snapshot of mobile device end user privacy concerns and behaviors. It provides descriptive statistics and utilizes an adaptation of the Westin privacy indexes to illustrate gender differences in privacy concerns. The results show an overall increase in concerns in an eleven-month period between independent samples of 989 undergraduate students. It consistently shows females reported higher concerns than their male counterparts. Mobile application developers should consider novel ways of addressing these possible differences in privacy related concerns and behaviors by gender.