The development of the Internet has brought great convenience to citizens' lives, but also caused a series of privacy security problems. The netizens' leakage of other's privacy is a major concern for information security government. In efforts to understand this problem, we employed the neutralization theory, a theory prominent in criminology but not yet applied in the context of privacy leakage. It offers new insight into how netizens rationalize their leakage behaviors. Choosing the human flesh search as a typical example of our research object, we proposed a research model to test the influence factors of the intention to leak other' privacy under the Internet. Using data from a sample of 759 valid questionnaires, the relevance of neutralization theory was tested via SmartPLS2.0. The findings indicated that the techniques associated with denial of responsibility, denial of victim, and avoidance of greater harm positively influenced the intention of leaking other's privacy, the technologies of denial of injury and appeal to higher loyalties had no significant effect on the intention. Furthermore, enhancing personal privacy awareness can effectively weaken the behavior intention to disclose the privacy of others. Our empirical results highlight neutralization and privacy awareness as important factors to take into account with regard to developing and implementing netizens' behavior policies and practices.
Key words
leak the privacy of others /
neutralization theory /
privacy awareness /
human flesh search
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