Information disclosing willingness in mobile internet contexts

Purpose This paper aims to learn about consumers’ information disclosing patterns in the mobile internet context by investigating how demographic, geographic and psychological factors influence their information disclosing willingness (IDW). Design/methodology/approach Drawing on self-disclosure theory, the authors carried out simple linear regression analyses on a Chinese sample of 10,000 participants. Findings The results revealed that significant gender differences exist between males and females in their IDW in mobile internet context, and females have higher IDW than males do. And the authors also found that first-tier (third tier) citizens have the lowest (highest) IDW in their mobile internet usage. Originality/value This study offers three implications. First, this paper captures the insight of IDW within the mobile internet context, while previous studies mostly focus on the desktop internet context. Second, the results show that females have higher willingness to disclose than males do in the context of mobile internet, which is different from the findings of prior studies that females have higher privacy concerns and lower disclosing willingness in the context of desktop internet. Thirdly, this research introduces city tiers as a new approach to the study of IDW, which is one of the first studies exploring the geographical effect on information privacy.