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Information privacy remains a significant issue for most individuals and organizations in the emergent data-economy (Chen, 2013; Dinev, 2014; Edwards, Hofmeyr and Forrest, 2016). Much research exists on individuals’ information privacy concerns (IPC), its antecedents, as well as its effects on individual users’ beliefs or behavioral reactions towards information technology. For comprehensive reviews of IPC research, see Yun, Lee, & Kim, 2019; Belanger & Crossler, 2011; Pelteret & Ophoff, 2016; & Magi, 2011.). The maturing of always-connected communications devices continues to contribute to the reported increase in privacy concerns (Yeung, Balebako, Gutierrez & Chaykowsky, 2020; Kantarcioglu & Ferrari, 2019; Georgiadou & Kounadi, 2019; Jensen & Wagner, 2018), especially given the expanding ability of such applications to ubiquitously collect disparate types of an individual’s data (Brennan & Lovells, 2016; Choi, Jiang, Xiao, & Kim, 2015; Choi, Wu, Yu & Land, 2018). As an example, various mobile and digital apps are, by design, capable of surreptitiously, unobtrusively and perpetually accessing, collecting and transmitting vast amounts of individual users’ personal information to extant parties (Lin and Armstrong, 2019; Georgiadou et al., 2019; Turgut et al., 2017; Guo et al., 2008; Lowry et al., 2011). Indeed, protection of privacy and the mitigation of bias and future risks to individuals brought about by privacy breaches now extend to more recent and emergent technologies such as facial recognition technologies (Yeung, et al., 2020), the Internet of Things (Turgut et al., 2017) and self-driving vehicles (Mladenović, et al., 2020).
Past studies have found that concerns about information privacy vary according to cultural dimensions (Cao & Everard, 2008; Guo et al., 2008; Gretzel et al., 2008; Posey et al., 2010; Georgiadou et al., 2019). The ubiquity and near-universal adoption of social media technologies may also likely have a bearing on relationships between country regulatory structure and perceptions of individuals’ information privacy. We also note that changes have continued to occur in the national regulatory structure domain as well. While Europe continued to move towards even tighter privacy regulation, with, for example, the passage of General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) (Wolters, 2017) the US and other regions of the world seem to continue on a path towards less government-directed and more market-based regulatory frameworks or consumer-beware self-regulation frameworks (McDermott, 2017; Georgiadou, et al., 2019).