Location Based Services and Information Privacy Concerns among Literate and Semi-literate Users

Location-based services mobile applications are becoming increasingly prevalent to the large population of semi-literate users living in emerging economies due to the low costs and ubiquity. However, usage of location-based services is still threatened by information privacy concerns. Studies typically only addressed how to mitigate information privacy concerns for the literate users and not the semi-literate users. To fill that gap and better understand information privacy concerns among different communities, this study draws upon theories of perceptual control and familiarity to identify the antecedents of information privacy concerns related to location-based service and user literacy. The proposed research model is empirically tested in a laboratory experiment. The findings show that the two location-based service channels (push and pull) affect the degree of information privacy concerns between the literate and semi-literate users. Implications for enhancing usage intentions and mitigating information privacy concerns for different types of mobile applications are discussed.