School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemPrivacy Concerns about Personalised Advertising on Facebook in Cambodia: The Correlation between Privacy Concerns and the Privacy Paradox( May 2023)Over the last two decades, the media industry revolution has been transformed from a web-as-information source to a web-as-participation platform called ‘social media’. Social media platforms are broadly characterised by lower barriers to creating and distributing media content by users. Public and individual expression has tremendously contributed to digital footprints in aggregating personal data for behavioural prediction and personalised advertising on social media sites, for example, Google, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. In the emergence of the digitalisation revolution, business models relied on digital platforms to communicate and connect with their customers’ communities through personalised advertising. Businesses have relied on social media’s personal data collection to understand a marketing predictive trend in which businesses can purchase access to segment and target audiences for personalised advertising. This personal data collection has triggered privacy concerns when individuals’ life details were collected and converted into digital data for the sake of industrial capitalism’s profits without users’ consent. To gain more insight into these issues, this study explored Facebook users’ privacy attitudes and behaviour towards personalised advertising. Additionally, the study evaluated users’ concerns about privacy-related issues and their understanding of personal data aggregation in relation to personalised advertising. To address this gap, this study focused on Cambodian university students aged between 18 and 39, and who were considered digital natives, public activists and e-commerce users. The data were collected through a mixed-method approach by conducting an online survey with 155 respondents and five in-depth semi-structured interviews. To gain comprehensive insights into consumers’ privacy attitudes and behaviours, survey data were analysed in conjunction with the interview results. The study indicated that most respondents were concerned about their personal information being aggregated and monetised by Facebook without consent. Most survey respondents never/rarely clicked on Facebook advertising formats such as photographs, videos, stories, messenger, carousel, slideshow, collection and playable advertising. However, survey and interview data divulged that they sometimes clicked on and engaged in influencer advertising because they regarded this content as informative, attractive and reliable for product review. The study discovered that respondents felt ambivalent towards personalised advertising and sometimes traded off their privacy to gain immediate benefits from that advertising. Their privacy decision-making process was affected by cost-benefit calculation, and it resulted in a ‘privacy paradox’, which depicts an individual’s intention to divulge personal information on social media despite stating privacy concerns. The results showed that most respondents understood how Facebook utilised their personal data for maximising advertising’s target audience, reach, direct advertising and tracking. However, while most participants appeared to understand the general strategies, they were less clear on precisely how their personal data were utilised for the technical operation of big data and algorithms, particularly Facebook Pixel and Facebook Offline Conversions. This study also suggests that future researchers should consider individuals’ socio-demographic factors—including age group, educational level, employment and income—to investigate their understanding of privacy-related issues on Facebook and the motives of advertising engagement and avoidance.