The Role of Privacy Risk in IT Acceptance: An Empirical Study

Privacy risk is increasingly entering the public consciousness when it comes to use of information technology (IT). To gain insight into the role of risk in the technology adoption process, we studied the use of information systems for student registration and schedule management at two major U.S. universities. We extended the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with perceptual measures of privacy risk harm and privacy risk likelihood which apply to the extended model and predict students’ intentions to use technology. Privacy risk factors are found to negatively influence intention and contribute substantially to model predictiveness. This finding underlines the growing importance of privacy risk in the use of IT.