The theory of privacy interests: A Heideggerian Onto-epistemological perspective toward privacy actions

Abstract

Prevailing information privacy theories have advanced understanding of how users evaluate privacy risks. Yet, they leave important aspects of user behavior insufficiently explained, particularly why some consumers proactively protect their personal information, whereas others remain passive despite expressing similar privacy concerns. Much of this research relies on privacy concerns as the primary indicator of privacy attitudes. Privacy concerns are crucial, but they largely capture users’ risk-focused evaluations of data collection, use, and disclosure. They therefore explain how users react to perceived privacy threats better than how users develop sustained engagement in protecting their privacy. We propose and test the Theory of Privacy Interests to explain this consumer-side engagement. By privacy interests, we mean users’ experiential engagement with protecting their personal information—the extent to which privacy protection is meaningful to them, they feel competent to pursue it, and they believe their actions can influence privacy outcomes. This construct refers to users’ privacy-protective interests, not to the economic or strategic interests of firms, platforms, or other producers that supply privacy-adjacent digital environments. Drawing on the Heideggerian onto-epistemological framework, we conceptualize privacy interests as experience-based, skillful engagement with privacy protection that develops through users’ repeated interactions with digital environments, privacy risks, and privacy-protective practices. We empirically examine privacy interests and privacy concerns as distinct but complementary constructs. Across three scale-development data collections and four survey studies with 3,922 participants, we find that privacy interests are more effective in explaining proactive privacy actions. In contrast, privacy concerns are more effective in explaining reactive privacy actions. This research operationalizes the Heideggerian onto-epistemological framework to shift attention from users’ risk evaluation to users’ sustained engagement in actualizing privacy protection. In doing so, our research offers a complementary explanation for variation in consumer privacy behavior and advances research on privacy attitudes, privacy actions, and the privacy paradox.