A cross-country comparison on user acceptance of multimedia cloud services - Germany and Japan

So-called multimedia cloud services (MCS), including SNS, have been widely spread, while various issues expressly related to privacy have been confirmed. For example, users´ privacy would be significantly infringed if information aggregated from cloud services is collected, analyzed and utilized without users´ permission or without full understanding by users, especially due to the nature of multimedia contents whose readability differs among users. This study aims to investigate how these services are accepted focusing on the influence of user´s privacy awareness by comparing two contrasting countries in terms of recognition and regulation on privacy infringement, namely Germany and Japan. An online questionnaire survey was conducted for 500 Internet users in each country and analyzed by our technology acceptance model (TAM) based research framework and Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). As a result, it was confirmed that the users´ privacy awareness positively affected the social identity that was the strongest factor to affect the utilization of MCS in both Germany and Japan.