The Impact of Data Privacy on Users' Smartphone App Adoption Decisions

Mobile smartphone applications can fuel themselves with a large and diverse set of data. Apps thereby become aware of the user and their context, enabling intelligent and adaptive applications. However such data poses severe privacy risks. Although users are only partially aware of them, awareness increases with the proliferation of privacy-enhancing technologies. This leads to a lower adoption rate of data-heavy smartphone apps, as non-usage often is the user’s only option to protect themselves. How privacy concerns affect app adoption is unclear. Studies researched that privacy concerns are an issue and the lack of sufficient privacy-enhancing technologies lowers app adoption. However, it is unclear which privacy-relevant aspects are mainly responsible for this effect and to what extent it plays a role for users. We conducted a survey (N=100) to investigate the relationship between privacy-relevant app- and publisher characteristics with the users’ intention to install and use it. We found that users are especially critical about contentful datatypes and apps that have rights to perform actions on their behalves. On the other hand, the expectation of a productive benefit induced by the app can increase the app adoption intention. Our findings show which aspects designers of privacy-enhancing technologies should focus on, to meet the demand for more user-centered privacy.