Cultural Influences on Attitudes Towards Hong Kong's Smart Identity Card

A Smart Identification Card (SIC) offers governments many opportunities for supporting e-government initiatives and combating immigration problems; however, it also creates concerns with respect to privacy invasions and security risks. This paper develops a culturally informed model to investigate people’s attitude towards the SIC scheme in Hong Kong. In this research, we argue that the assessment and interpretation of risks and values associated with the SIC are culturally rooted. Building on the work of Hofstede and his colleagues, we describe the cultural dimensions related to this research and set out an agenda for the ongoing empirical work. We anticipate that our research will be of value to both government policy makers and privacy researchers.