Factors of Intention to Use a Photo Tool: Comparison Between Privacy-Enhancing and Non-privacy-enhancing Tools

Tools that detect and transform privacy sensitive information in user content have been proposed to enhance privacy in contexts such as social media. However, previous research has found that privacy-related concerns can be higher in these types of tools compared to similar non-privacy tools. In this paper, we focus on adoption of these tools and investigate how the knowledge that a data-processing tool has a privacy purpose affects privacy-related factors of intention to use such a tool, when compared with a similar tool with a non-privacy-related purpose. We conducted a user study where we described a privacy-enhancing and a non-privacy-enhancing photo manipulation app to two groups of participants. The results show that general and context-specific privacy-related perception has different effects for the two types of apps. In particular, although participants perceived the same level of privacy risk towards both types of apps, this risk only had a significant negative effect on intention to use in the case of the privacy-enhancing app. Furthermore, disposition to value privacy increased both perceived risk and intention to use the privacy-enhancing app. We discuss these findings in the context of the diffusion of privacy-enhancing tools for user content.