We investigate the construct of privacy concern and its dimensions, together with its expected counterbalance, trust in the information collector, on willingness to disclose different information types to a digital seller in a multicountry study. This issue is critical, given the evolution of technologies that now allow for the collection and analysis of a huge amount of data. We conceptualise consumers’ privacy concerns as the extent to which a consumer is concerned about (Milberg, et al., 2000; Rose, 2006): (1) the general collection of personal information (data collection), (2) unauthorised secondary use (data secondary usage), (3) improper access (data access) and (4) errors (data accuracy). The first contribution of our research is that we will verify the validity of the four dimensions of information privacy concern in a multiple-country study. We then develop a model by testing the impacts of privacy concern and trust on the willingness to disclose sensitive and non-sensitive information. First, our results validate the privacy concern scale based on the four dimensions (data collection, data secondary usage, data access and data accuracy) in eight countries and show that information disclosure can contain an inner trap based on customer training to disclose information that may transform information disclosure in an habit that increases willingness to share that may overcome the effects of privacy concern and trust on customers’ intended behaviours, opening possibilities of potential harmful behaviours on the part of companies to get data from their prospects that should be carefully monitored and managed.

• Monica Grosso(emlyon business school, France)
• Sandro Castaldo(SDA Bocconi School of Management, Italy)
• Hua Li(IDRAC Business School, France)