Watch Your Mobile Payment: An Empirical Study of Privacy Disclosure

Using a smartphone as payment device has become a highly attractive feature that is increasingly influencing user acceptance. Electronic wallets, near field communication, and mobile shopping applications, are all incentives that push users to adopt m-payment. Hence, this makes the sensitive data that already exists on everyone´s smartphone easily collated to their financial transaction details. In fact, misusing m-payment can be a real privacy threat. The existing privacy issues regarding m-payment are already numerous, and can be caused by different factors. We investigate, through an empirical survey-based study, the different factors and their potential correlations and regression values. We identify three factors that influence directly privacy disclosure: the user´s privacy concerns, his risk perception, and the protection measure appropriateness. These factors are impacted by indirect ones, which are linked to the users´ and the technology´s characteristics, and the behaviour of institutions and companies. In order to analyse the impact of each factor, we define a new research model for privacy disclosure based on several hypotheses. The study is mainly based on a five-item scale survey, and on the modelling of structural equations. In addition to the impact estimations for each factor, our study results indicate that the privacy disclosure in m-payment is primarily caused by the "protection measure appropriateness", which, in its turn, impacted by "the m-payment convenience". We discuss in this paper the research model, the methodology, the findings and their significance.