온라인 커뮤니티기반 블로그 활동에 영향을 미치는프라이버시 정보의 유형과 조절변수 연구

Investment and development in telecommunication and database technology are accelerated, and so privacy concerns are getting serious as the new social issue. Studies on privacy and personal information have cared about various contexts, including the personal information in organizational life (Culnan, 1993) and the consumer information (Smith et al, 1996). However, there is no study on the context of online community where the community members exchange and sometimes circulate personal information in free and equal relationship. Internet users have created their own home pages to disclose themselves, and also maintained the social interactions with other people in online communities (Wynn & Katz, 1997). BLOG, which combines two words of Web and Log, has maintained these two features as well: i.e., self-disclosure and social interaction. BLOG sites in Korea have positioned as portal sites with the services of community building and information retrieval by search engine. Due to the heavy traffics of visitors and advanced search engine functions, personal information in BLOG is under the high risk of being leaked out. Hosts of BLOG invite the exclusive members to share personal information, and sometimes have their site linked to other member’s BLOG. Such exclusive network of private BLOG, however, is out of control regarding privacy from the standpoint of hosts because the mushroomed BLOGs have full independence in copying, distributing, and uploading other member’s private and personal information. Personal information contains various aspects of a person such as profile, social interaction, writing, and etc. Therefore, BLOGs where communities are built and interacted have the positive aspect of nurturing social interaction and intimacy as well as the negative risk of privacy infringement. Such risk has made potential visitors hesitate to use BLOG, and deterred the social interaction between BLOG users. This study investigates the major factors that cause privacy concerns on BLOG, and the influence of such concerns on social interactivity on BLOG community. Our findings could help reduce the concerns of BLOG users on privacy issue, while maintaining their motivations to remain active on BLOG.