۱- Introduction

۲- Theoretical framework

۳- Research variables and hypotheses development

۴- Research methodology

۵- Research results

۶- Discussions

۷- Conclusions

References

Abstract

Despite prevalent privacy and security threats on the cloud, users have put tremendous amounts of their personal information on cloud storage. This present study proposes a comprehensive research framework to investigate cloud storage users’ willingness to put personal information on personal cloud-based storage applications. Our research framework is theoretically derived from the Communication Privacy Management Theory and Privacy-Trust-Behavioral Intention Model. To empirically test our research framework, we conducted an online survey of 786 active cloud storage users both in Indonesia and Taiwan. The findings suggest that cloud storage users’ willingness to put personal information is highly influenced by trust, perceived costs, perceived benefits, and also the degree of sensitivity of the personal information. Some findings with regard to cultural differences between the two countries are also showed out. The key findings, implications, and limitations are discussed in this paper.

Introduction

Cloud storage has been widely used as online storage virtualization by many people in around the globe. As in 2018, cloud storage users have reached around 1.926 billion users (Statista, 2018) and up to now tremendous amount of data has been put onto the cloud, including the sensitive one (Kohgadai, 2018). However, since the data is digitally recorded on the cloud, users may lose control over their data, and consequently, privacy and security concerns, as well as privacy risks may be raised. Users may not exactly know what will happen to their data, and whether cloud storage providers will keep their data safe or use it for their own benefits. Privacy and security issues on the cloud storage have been tremendous problems (Chou, 2013; Kalloniatis et al., 2014). For example, in 2014, iCloud was breached by hackers (Lewis, 2014). Other incidents of security weaknesses as well as cyber attacks on Google Drive, Dropbox, and Amazon Web Services cloud storage server had also been reported (Chou, 2013; Chu et al., 2013; Johnson, 2018). Moreover, some surveys also showed that users have high privacy and security concerns on cloud storage (Barker, 2015; Gasiorowski-Denis, 2015). Thus, in light of the pertinent cloud storage privacy and security issues, and the amount of data that users have put on the cloud, cloud storage privacy and security related research should be of utmost importance.