Edinburgh Napier University

  This project sets out to address the following research questions: • Is there a reliable typology for personal risk that can be used to analyse the privacy calculus that users engage in? • What is the nature of the interactions and risks that users engage in when they use the Internet? • Can the new risk typology be applied to existing empirical data to refine the privacy calculus? • What effect will the new categorisation of risk have? • Can these figures be used to improve the predictions of user behaviour? Research on privacy calculus has largely been based on user perceptions of the risks and benefits associated with disclosure of personal information (Dinev and Hart, 2006; Krasnova, Veltri and Günther, 2012). Rosenblum (2007) developed a typology of risks associated with online social networking services (SNSs). Haynes and Robinson (2015) looked at personal risk derived from generic risk categories (Swedlow et al., 2009, p. 237). However there is no consensus on a risk typology and further work is needed to provide a consistent approach to privacy calculus. The online activity of six participants was monitored to identify when they disclosed personal data online and to explore the motivations for these disclosures. They were also questioned about their perceptions of risk. The resulting analysis suggested that an ontology would be better than a typology to represent the complex relationships between risk concepts (Haynes, 2019).