Why Would I Use Location-Protective Settings on My Smartphone? Motivating Protective Behaviors and the Existence of the Privacy Knowledge–Belief Gap

Smartphones have become essential for functioning in society, but as more personal information is accessed, transferred, or stored on smartphones, users struggle to control the release of their information via privacy settings. To enhance their privacy, individuals must be knowledgeable about their smartphone and motivated to use the device’s settings. Therefore, we explore the roles of knowledge and motivation in affecting smartphone owners’ use of settings to limit sharing of location-based information. The authors find that personal motivation is the strongest factor affecting such use, and the opinions of others do not matter. This is likely because of the personal nature of smartphones. Furthermore, privacy knowledge and individuals’ perceptions of their abilities to use privacy settings also affect this usage. However, a privacy knowledge–belief gap exists by which people with high levels of privacy knowledge utilize less restrictive privacy settings when their confidence in protecting themselves is low. The combined lack of effect from social motivation and the importance of perceived and actual privacy knowledge suggest that asking parents, teachers, or “important” others to tell individuals how to better protect themselves is unlikely to give the intended results. Instead, we need to appeal to individuals’ personal motivation and offer them training via experiential learning, such as games or educational apps. The omnipresence of smartphones means that more and more personal information is accessed, transferred, or stored on these devices. Smartphone users struggle to control the release of their information when smartphones are always connected, close at hand, and the privacy settings for individual apps are difficult to access. To have meaningful privacy in this context, individuals must be knowledgeable about their devices and truly motivated to make use of the device’s privacy settings. We draw from extant privacy literature, the self-efficacy theory, and the information–motivation–behavioral skills model to understand usage of privacy settings on smartphones through data from 334 iPhone users. Our findings indicate that personal motivation is one of the strongest determinants of utilizing privacy-protective settings, and social motivation is not significant. Furthermore, privacy knowledge and self-efficacy constructs (i.e., knowledge specific to the device’s privacy settings) determine one’s use of privacy-protective settings, but knowledge a