The Effects of Physiological Arousal and Message Framing on Fitness App Users’ Privacy Decisions

Privacy issues are becoming prevalent in users’ fitness app usage and hence gaining great attention from users and policymakers. A typical example is inappropriate authorization of access to app data. Yet, it is not clear what factors will influence users’ third-party authorization. Specifically, users’ situational states are rarely considered. This study thus investigates how an important situational state, i.e., physiological arousal, affects users’ decisions of authorizing private data in fitness apps to SNS. We concurrently examine a factor of the decision context, i.e., message framing, a design heuristic to nudge people’s privacy decisions. We hypothesize that both high physiological arousal and loss-framed message increase users’ likelihood to grant third-party authorization, and there is a positive interaction between the two factors. We plan to conduct an experiment to test the hypotheses.