The Relationship of Privacy Violation and Psychological Distance in Korean Ubiquitous Government Service

Today the u-government services are becoming more personalized and intelligent. For the successful implementation of personalization, individual user’s privacy concerns must be respected and taken care of. Based on the empirical survey results, this research summarizes the reluctance to the government’s use of private information using six categories. We measure user’s psychological distance toward e-government using the four levels, adopting the suggestions by the Proxemics. Since a positive correlation is identified between people’s psychological intimacy toward e-government and their tolerance to the use of private information, the amount and/or types of private information should be sequentially used in personalization systems. Initially allowing the least intolerable private information such as occupation information, the personalization system should additionally use the next tolerable information such as health information or service request/interest information, as user’s psychological distance toward government services becomes shorter.