From Privacy Concern to Uses of Social Network Sites: A Cultural Comparison via User Survey

Individuals from different regions normally bear different cultural norms and values, and these variations would in turn affect their behavior and attitude with the computing system. However, though the cross-cultural study has been performed in other areas (e.g., e-commerce websites), few have identified its influence on users´ behavior in social network sites (SNS). With the increasing popularity of SNS (e.g., Face book) worldwide, especially in Asian region, we are interested in revealing the effect of culture variables on users´ privacy concern and trust in SNS, and furthermore their influence on users´ usage motivation, actual uses, overall attitudes and future behavior intentions. This paper presents the in-depth analysis of results from an online survey, which indicates the significant differences between Hong Kong and French SNS users, in respect of various measures. Moreover, it shows that for predicting a user´s usage pattern, her/his culture value should be considered since the predictors are different between the two cultural groups.