The role of trust in personal information disclosure on health-related websites

Sharing personal information is necessary to fully utilize health-related websites but consumer trust is needed for this. This research models trust in personal information disclosure on health-related websites. This model identifies ten factors grouped in three categories. The first category is dispositional factors including faith in humanity, trusting stance and privacy concern. The second category is situational factors including reputation and perceived risk. Lastly the third category is institutional factors including the effectiveness of the privacy statement, third party certification, legal and regulation and security infrastructure. Low risk, reputation, effective privacy statement and privacy seals were found to facilitate trust. While institutional factors like the legal framework and regulation have an important role to keep the consumer safe in this context, lack of clarity on what they are leads to a weak perception of their value. Trust in the health-related website was found to positively influence the intention to disclose information. Link to journal: http://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2017_rp/50/ Reference: Chen L., Zarifis A. & Kroenung J. (2017) ‘The role of trust in personal information disclosure on health-related websites’, Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), pp.771-786, ISBN 978-0-9915567-0-0. Available from: http://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2017_rp/50/