2020 and 2021 were shocking years for advertising and digital marketing since both Apple and Google announced that they would limit third-party tracking. Google and Apple’s news created turmoil in the marketing business sector since advertisers no longer will be able to target and track the success of their digital ads as efficiently and effectively. In addition, there will be significant changes in the industry since these new privacy rules mean that there will be an inability of personalisation and just-in-time targeting for digital marketing, and advertisers have dubbed this situation the “adpocalypse.”  Both secondary and primary data were collected to answer the research question, how have the new privacy rules and regulations impacted the different steps of the AIDA model in digital media planning for digital advertising. Secondary data has been collected from business journals and academic journals, and the primary data has been collected through in-depth interviews. Further, the research is exploratory and explores the research question to give the reader a greater understanding of the subject area.   The following can be concluded from the research. Internet privacy rules and regulations will impact awareness, and it will be more challenging for companies to create awareness for their product offerings. Awareness will be heavily built on brand recognition, and the strategies for this step will revert to more traditional methods.  Interest would be affected since companies no longer will be able to follow up on their communication strategies as effectively. This research showed that the further down the company’s sales funnel, the more impacted the strategies. Further, desire would be more challenging for companies to create since retargeting, just-in-time targeting, and micro-targeting would no longer be possible in the same manner. Lastly, since action results from desire, this step would be heavily impacted.

Individualised online marketing requires taking a stand regarding legal laws and user privacy. Although laws and regulations have arisen to strengthen individuals' rights to privacy and data control, the subject is still perceived as complex. The purpose of the study is to make it easier for companies' marketing departments when communicating with consumers, by creating an insight into the consumer's perception of how sharing their personal data affects marketing on the internet. This study aims to investigate consumers' experiences regarding privacy and personal data for marketing purposes. The aim is to gain an insight into how users assess the value of the positive aspects of internet use, concerning the concerns linked to protecting personal data. Researchers of the study will research which factors impact consumers than they are sharing their personal data.  To answer the research question, 16 interviews were conducted, based on the consumer perspective. Respondents answered questions about their experience of privacy and sharing personal data when using the internet. At the same time, the study shows that consumers do not know how little control they have over their personal data. The study also shows that consumers value their privacy when sharing personal data online by trying to control the sharing of personal data. The empirical material shows that there are consumers who appreciate targeted marketing, while other consumers see it as an invasion of privacy. The study's theoretical contribution includes a model that infers the factors a consumer considers when deciding whether to share their personal data. The study concludes that consumers' experience of invasion of privacy makes them choose to minimise the sharing of personal data. This results in targeted online marketing being negatively affected, as consumers minimise the sharing of personal data. The study also concludes that consumers' relationship with companies deteriorates in cases where consumers experience lower trust, when they experience that their integrity is being violated.

Concern about privacy is an important consideration for users of information and communication technologies (ICT), particularly when using computer-mediated communication (CMC), i.e. Internet usage. Several researchers have studied privacy issues by taking into account the views of users to include individuals, organisations, privacy policy makers, governments and trust organisations. This thesis investigates whether an individual's perspectives about privacy are culturally relevant when using the Internet. This research used a survey in the form of a questionnaire in two countries, namely, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia to compare online privacy perspectives of young and mature (male and female) Saudi and Malaysian students. The research examines the relationship of the effect of the cultural background including the effect of social norms, religious belief, Internet regulation and IT skills of these Internet users upon their attitude towards privacy online and their perspectives about privacy. It also examines the effect of nationality (Malaysian and Saudi), gender and age groups. In this study, online privacy perspectives are a synthesis of three perceptions; what is 'personal' information online, the online privacy concerns and the Internet trust, whereby the cultural effects are the effect of religious beliefs, social norms, Internet regulation and IT skills in the privacy attitudes of keeping personal information safe, caring about their and others' privacy online and when revealing personal information. The demographic factors in this research are nationality, gender and age. To study these relationships, the research uses t-test, ANOVA, and single regression methods as data analysis techniques. The results show that the level of concern and degree of trust exhibited by Malaysian students with regard to submitting personal information via the Internet was affected the most by their gender, and social norms upon their online privacy attitudes. For Saudi students, the level of concern and trust with regard to submitting personal information via the Internet was found to be related to the effect of their age, gender, and religious beliefs on their online privacy attitudes. The other cultural factors, i.e. Internet regulation in force in each country and the IT skills of participants, are likely to have equal effects on both Malaysian and Saudi privacy perspectives. This research adds the cultural background, age and gender effects to the model of the calculus of the privacy concern that is proposed by Dinev and Hart (2006, pp. 63-64). The research also establishes what is 'private' in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, by identifying 'what counts as personal information with regard to Internet users' and provides a comparison in this concept between the two countries, their gender and age groups. For examples, Malaysian students consider name, e-mail address, date of birth, nationality and religion as 'personal' information and Saudi students consider home address, phone number, photographic image and credit card number as 'personal' information. In addition Saudi females tend to consider, particularly, home address, phone number, and photographic image as 'personal' information more than Saudi males. These findings should help both web designers and Internet policy makers in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia to consider these cultural effects when designing the privacy policies of their websites.

Attacks on computer systems continue to be a problem. The majority of the attacks target home computer users. To help mitigate the attacks some companies provide security awareness training to their employees. However, not all people work for a company that provides security awareness training and typically, home computer users do not have the incentive to take security awareness training on their own. Research in security awareness and security behavior has produced conflicting results. Therefore, it is not clear, how security aware home computer users are or to what extent security awareness affects the security behavior of home computer users. The goal of this study was to determine if there is a relationship between security awareness and users practicing good security behavior. This study adapted its research model from the health belief model (HBM), which accesses a patient’s decision to perform health related activities. The research model included the HBM constructs of perceived severity, perceived susceptibility, perceived threat, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, cues to action, and self-efficacy. The research model also contained the security awareness (SA) and concern for information privacy (CFIP) constructs. The model used SA to ascertain the effect of security awareness on a person’s self-efficacy in information security (SEIS), perceived threat, CFIP, and security behavior. The research model included CFIP to ascertain its effect on security behavior. The developed survey measured the participants' security awareness, concern for information privacy, self-efficacy, expectations of security actions, perceived security threats, cues to action, and security behavior. SurveyMonkey administered the survey. SurveyMonkey randomly selected 267 participants from its 30 million-member base. The findings of this study indicate home computer users are security aware. SA does not have a direct effect on a user’s security behavior, perceived threat, or CFIP. However, it does have influence on SEIS. SEIS has a weak effect on expectations. CFIP has an effect on a user’s security behavior after removing perceived threat from the research model. Perceived susceptibility has a direct effect on a user’s security behavior, but perceived severity or perceived threat does not.

Privacy has always been a respected value regardless of national borders, cultural differences, and time in every society throughout history. This study focuses on the unprecedented changes in the traditional forms of privacy and consequent concerns with regard to invasion of privacy along with the recent emergence and wide use of the Internet. Government intrusion into private domains through the Internet is examined as a major concern. Privacy invasions by Web marketers, hacker threats against privacy, and employer invasion of employee privacy at the workplace are discussed respectively. Then a set of possible solutions to solve the current problems and alleviate the concerns in this field is offered. Legal remedies that need to be performed by the government are presented as the initial solution. Then encryption is introduced as a strong technical method that may be helpful. Finally, a set of individual measures emphasized as complementary practical necessities. Nevertheless, this study indicates that technology will keep making further changes in the form and concerns of privacy that possibly may outdate these findings in the near future, however, privacy itself will always remain as a cherished social value as it has always been so far.

<p>The current information society is collecting information about individual needs, wants and desires continuously with the help of new technologies. Information systems, such as consumer relationship management (CRM) have a crucial importance when providing personalized services to the customers. This is done by gathering, storing, maintaining and distributing important consumer knowledge throughout the organization. (Chen & Popovich, 2003) However as previous studies have shown, consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about threats to their personal privacy when new technologies are integrated into the society (e.g. Cranor et al, 1999; Kervenoael et al, 2007). As these emerging issues are becoming more common in the consumers’ daily lives, it is of great importance to discover their perceptions about it. Hence, the purpose of this study is to examine the consumers’ perception about their privacy and how they affiliate with their personal information being processed in various organizations.</p><p>The theoretical framework suggests that several factors affects the consumers comfort in sharing personal information to companies, such as the physical environment of the organization, which type of information that is shared, what organization that stores and uses the information, the psychological distance the actors have to each other and how much control the consumers have over the use of their personal information. A selfadministered questionnaire was used to collect the data. The results showed that the majority of the respondents were concerned about the information that is gathered about them, which further emphasises the importance of this study. It was evident that the respondents were more willing to provide demographic and lifestyle information, rather than financial and purchase related information. The results also showed a variation depending on which organization that is considered. The various organizations were categorized into four different groups; Intimate distance, personal distance, social distance and public distance, depending on the respondents’ perceived comfort in sharing their personal information with them.</p><p>Some significant differences were observed between the various demographic groups as well. One of the findings indicates that men appear to be more comfortable in sharing their personal information to certain companies in comparison to women, due to a higher intellectual risk-propensity. It is argued that the consumers concern for privacy is an important issue to consider for companies. In order to maintain a strong relationship with their customers it should be integrated as an essential part of their CRM-strategies to make their information gathering techniques more efficient.</p>

The current information society is collecting information about individual needs, wants and desires continuously with the help of new technologies. Information systems, such as consumer relationship management (CRM) have a crucial importance when providing personalized services to the customers. This is done by gathering, storing, maintaining and distributing important consumer knowledge throughout the organization. (Chen &amp; Popovich, 2003) However as previous studies have shown, consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about threats to their personal privacy when new technologies are integrated into the society (e.g. Cranor et al, 1999; Kervenoael et al, 2007). As these emerging issues are becoming more common in the consumers’ daily lives, it is of great importance to discover their perceptions about it. Hence, the purpose of this study is to examine the consumers’ perception about their privacy and how they affiliate with their personal information being processed in various organizations. The theoretical framework suggests that several factors affects the consumers comfort in sharing personal information to companies, such as the physical environment of the organization, which type of information that is shared, what organization that stores and uses the information, the psychological distance the actors have to each other and how much control the consumers have over the use of their personal information. A selfadministered questionnaire was used to collect the data. The results showed that the majority of the respondents were concerned about the information that is gathered about them, which further emphasises the importance of this study. It was evident that the respondents were more willing to provide demographic and lifestyle information, rather than financial and purchase related information. The results also showed a variation depending on which organization that is considered. The various organizations were categorized into four different groups; Intimate distance, personal distance, social distance and public distance, depending on the respondents’ perceived comfort in sharing their personal information with them. Some significant differences were observed between the various demographic groups as well. One of the findings indicates that men appear to be more comfortable in sharing their personal information to certain companies in comparison to women, due to a higher intellectual risk-propensity. It is argued that the consumers concern for privacy is an important issue to consider for companies. In order to maintain a strong relationship with their customers it should be integrated as an essential part of their CRM-strategies to make their information gathering techniques more efficient.

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to explain and to create an understanding if personalized advertising online creates value for customers.  Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative study through 14 semi-structured interviews.  Findings: The study found personalized advertising to be seen as value co-creation in some cases, but because privacy concerns exist and affect the perception of advertising, it can in many cases lead to value co-destruction instead. It is thus a consideration between privacy concerns and the perceived value of the personalized advertising that decides if the offering will co-create or co-destroy value.  Research limitations/implications for future research: Our study did not involve respondents’ younger than 21 years old, which could have affected the result as this is a generation seen as technology savvy. Through a quantitative study, future research could try to find extremes in personalities by conducting a survey with a large sample of people in different ages, nationalities, gender, active online, etc. in order to see if there are correlations between for example age and privacy concerns.  Practical implications: One purpose of the study is to provide companies with insights of how different customers perceive personalized advertising online in terms of customer value in order for companies to know how to think when targeting their customers.  Keywords: online advertising, personalized advertising, personalized-privacy paradox, privacy concerns, value creation, value co-creation, value co-destruction.

Increasingly, online social media networks allow users to use geotagging. This method of adding location data to various content shared in real time has introduced privacy related issues and threats to the users of such networks. Previous research present opposing findings on whether users actually care about their location privacy or not, and it has also been shown that users often display a behaviour inconsistent with their concerns. When asked, users tend to report high privacy concerns, but in contrast, they will then not let their privacy concerns affect or limit their behaviour online; the privacy paradox is a description of this dichotomy. The problem, however, is not only that location privacy seems to be a paradoxical issue; the sharing of location data provides users with new possibilities that can potentially have negative consequences for them, such as someone else being able to identify one’s identity, home location, habits or other sensitive information. Social media network users communicate that a part of this is due to the lack of control over which information they share, with whom and where.This study employs a qualitative method, using unstructured interviews in a pre-study and a self-completion questionnaire. The purpose of the study is to examine and gain a better understanding of how the privacy paradox can help to better explain users’ location data disclosure preferences in the context of social media networking, and to help social media network developers in order to reduce privacy-related issues in social media networking applications with geotagging capabilities. The findings indicate that the paradox indeed is evident in user’s stated geotagging behaviour, and that users are slightly more worried about their location privacy than their overall online privacy. The conclusions offer a couple of different explanations for the paradox, and we argue that the contradiction of the paradox can be seen as a constant trade-off between benefits and risks of geotagging. We also give some examples of such advantages and disadvantages.

Adoption of location-based services (LBS) was for a long time below expectations, and most of the studies attribute it to privacy concerns of users. However, many new LBS applications are currently among the most downloaded application for smartphones, particularly entertainment applications. Therefore, this research aims to find out whether privacy concerns still matter to users and to explore the role of the privacy in the adoption of LBS entertaining applications. The adopted methodology is qualitative research and data are collected through interviews and additional information from the smartphones ofparticipants. Ten individuals among university students at Linnaeus University in Sweden are selected for this research, and this sample choice is per their experience with two selected LBS entertaining applications, Pokémon Go and Tinder. As a result, six themes have been recognized to answer the research questions. Low privacy concerns about location information, especially in entertainment applications with negligible effect on adoption have been identified. However, author of this research suggests, that developers of LBS entertaining applications should care for retaining their credibility because it can have an impact on the adoption of their LBS services.