The Role of Privacy in Smartphone Apps Usage

We studied the importance of online privacy of personal data and security on smartphone apps among undergraduate students. In latent class regression analysis, our independent variables were gender, app usage, and knowledge. A two-cluster solution found evidence of the privacy paradox. Privacy was important, but they spent significant time in location-based apps, which gather data about them and erode their privacy. In both clusters, knowledge, as measured through studying, positively related to privacy concerns. Surprisingly, gender was not statistically significant.