Contextual Integrity and Personal Health Information Sharing in Online Social Networks
Authors: Li, Han; Luo, Xin; Sarathy, Rathindra; Xu, Heng
Journal: Journal of the Association for Information Systems (2024)
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00892
<jats:p>Many online social network (OSN) users exchange health-related information on OSNs to manage their health, obtain support, and offer assistance to others facing similar medical challenges. Nonetheless, OSN users are concerned about the privacy of their health information. Extant studies on online information privacy have largely resorted to a calculus perspective, focusing on the costs and benefits of information exchange with commercial vendors. Such a perspective, however, fails to capture the nuanced flows of personal health information (PHI) on OSNs, which involves more than two parties. To address this gap and further advance the research on information privacy, this paper embraces the theory of contextual integrity to explore the distinctive contextual idiosyncrasies of PHI flow on OSNs. In particular, we examine how context-specific values and norms affect OSN users’ personal privacy norms and their PHI disclosure intentions. Our theory-driven empirical results suggest that contextual values and normative expectations related to technology control, legislation, and peer users collectively influence OSN users’ personal privacy norms. In addition, perceived personal v…