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.