Why We Don’t Block 3rd Party Trackers: An Attributional Theory Perspective

Research on online consumer privacy typically relies on the trust-risk framework to explain users’ reactions to perceived privacy threats. However, little is known about such reactions in the context of third party tracking, where there is no explicitly defined agent to be trusted. In this research-in-progress, we propose an that in these situations users rely to the their attributional styles to shape their future actions. We present a model that predicts behavioral intentions based on traditional protection motivation theory and complements it with the construct of attributional style.