The paradox and the naked reality is that people are simultaneously needing to protect their personal information by not participating in online transactions, while also needing to participate in online transactions to obtain goods or services, which requires a disclosure of personal information. We are at such a crossroad because of the universality of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In some countries, people are still being infected by COVID-19 at an alarming rate and dying in large numbers. From a business technology standpoint, the pandemic has exponentially advanced e-commerce, finance, government, medicine, banking and digital transformation more than anything else could have done. The phenomenon affects peoples’ online behaviors similarly. Another observed reality is the universality or the oneness of the global mitigation measures, in absence of a viable available vaccine – such as social distancing, use of facial coverings, washing of hands, and avoidance of large gatherings. Consequently, from an information privacy perspective, the situation has reinforced the argument that it is the need signal more than the privacy concern that drives individuals to disclose their personal information online.
With the ongoing spread of this coronavirus, these mitigation efforts, in addition to partial physical shut-downs of businesses and other entities, have become the limited antidotes necessary to safeguard people’s lives. It has also become apparent, anecdotally and empirically, that the need to obtain goods and services online has shown to outweigh the citizenry’s concern for personal information disclosure. Although people still fall into the four natural categorized states of information privacy – solitude, reserve, intimacy, and anonymity – the gap between their responses to personal information disclosure has blurred. In other words, the difference in their attitudes toward online participation has diminished.
Under normal circumstances, including prior to the pandemic, information privacy fundamentalists tend to have difficulty ordering goods and services online because they are very apprehensive and fearful about disclosing their personal information online, so that their personal information would not be compromised. Although the information privacy pragmatists are usually more amendable to participating in an online transaction than the fundamentalists, they carefully assess each of their online transaction engagements. As one might expect, the information privacy unconcerned are not deterred; they are willing to participate in online transactions regardless of the times. This pandemic era has engineered a dependency on online transactions and seems to have soften the fundamentalists’ and the pragmatists’ attitudes toward online transactions.
The import of this observation and discussion is that the line between being an information privacy fundamentalist, pragmatist and unconcerned is now distorted due to COVID-19. The need to preserve life and the need to obtain goods and services from e-commerce, e-government, e-healthcare, and e-finance have shown to outweigh individuals’ information privacy concerns. The implication of this phenomenon should be of great importance to researcher and practitioners alike.
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