A socio-ecological approach to national differences in online privacy concern: The role of relational mobility and trust

Despite ongoing interest in cross-cultural differences in Internet privacy concern (concern over unauthorized third-party access to self-disclosures on the Internet), predictors of between-country variance in online privacy concern are yet unclear. This paper proposes a novel theoretical account from a socio-ecological perspective, focusing on the effect of societal levels of relational mobility (the degree to which individuals in a society have the freedom and opportunity to form and terminate interpersonal relationships) and general trust on online privacy concern. In low relational mobility Japan, where general trust in strangers is generally less adaptive, we hypothesized online privacy concern to be high. In contrast, in high relational mobility United States, general trust is also high, leading us to predict lower concern over privacy. We tested this hypothesis via a survey of SNS users in Japan (N = 90) and the US (N = 256). Results showed privacy concern on SNS was indeed higher in Japan than the US, and this difference was significantly mediated by relational mobility and general trust, in serial. We argue our findings underpin the importance of taking into account offline socio-ecological factors when approaching cross-cultural differences in privacy concern online.