Privacy concerns of Indonesian Internet users : Investigating the level of concern among ecommerce users

Abstract: The growth of digital marketing has poses a challenge in the area of online privacy and ethical conduct. Internet users in Indonesia, a country with with an immense amount of Internet users, have suffered from many online privacy threats such as personal data trading and online scams. As previous studies have shown that users’ online protective behaviors are influenced by their level of concerns, this study aims to investigate the users’ concerns about their online privacy, as well as the motivations, with a focus on the e-commerce sector. The study used a context-based questionnaire method developed based on IUIPC, to investigate the level of concern and the motivations, as well as statistical correlation analysis to measure the influence of privacy awareness and Internet knowledge towards privacy concerns. The study was distributed to adult Internet users in Indonesia that use the Internet for e-commerce and have a minimum education level of high school. The results revealed that in general eight out of ten users are concerned about their personal data online. Specifically, in the privacy concerns dimension of Control, Collection, and Awareness, the users are most concerned about having control over their data and the collection of identifiable information, but less concerned about the absence of privacy policy and the collection of non-identifiable information such as their views and interest. The biggest reason for the users to feel concerned is the worry of data misuse such as fraud, whereas the reasons to be less concerned include applying self-protection online behavior, trust in the services used, and acceptance of trade-off and control loss. Finally, only the awareness of online fraud has shown a significant correlation to the level of privacy concerns out of six privacy awareness and Internet knowledge items assessed.