Personalised advertising and data privacy on Facebook: the case of Portugal ; Publicidade personalizada e privacidade dos dados no Facebook: o caso de Portugal

The evolution of the technological world has allowed companies and consumers to be increasingly connected, especially due to social networks. Along with the development of social networks, personalised advertising has grown exponentially, becoming the most effective advertising strategy as it allows companies to interact with consumers in a customised way and offer products and services that are in accordance with their profiles. However, although personalised advertising offers benefits to both companies and consumers, in recent years the concern about data privacy has increased. Thus, this research aims to understand the gap existing between personalised advertising and data privacy concerns, since users want to receive ads with high predictive ability of their needs, however the collection and use of their data causes insecurity in relation to their privacy. As a way to achieve this objective, a mixed-methods approach was used by creating a questionnaire based on the existing literature. A total of 583 valid responses were collected and analysed using IBM SPSS Statistics version 28 software for quantitative data analysis and NVivo Software version 12 for qualitative data analysis The results allowed the support of three research hypotheses and the rejection of four hypotheses. The conclusions obtained indicate that personalised advertising causes data privacy concerns and through the thematic analysis performed to one of the qualitative questions it was possible to determine 17 situations in which respondents stated that this type of advertising threatened their privacy. Furthermore, the statistically significant result of the chi-square test suggests that consumers seek to protect their data on Facebook, not supporting the privacy paradox. Furthermore, this research suggests the existence of a relationship between personalised advertising and cyber-paranoia, as consumers believe they are constantly being ‘listened to’ through their mobile phone’s microphone and that their conversations are used for ...