The perils of gamification: Does engaging with gamified services increase users' willingness to disclose personal information?

The increasing use of gamification in the digital service landscape has caught the attention of practitioners and marketers alike. Alarmingly, most of the empirical research has attested to the benefits of such gamified service (e.g. apps) use while neglecting to address potential drawbacks. This research suggests that users of gamified apps end up being more likely to share private information with firms, thus threatening their own personal information privacy. Against this background, the present study links gamification to information disclosure and demonstrates that if a gamified service conveys experiences of, for instance, social comparison, it can indeed lead to greater willingness to disclose personal information. This relationship can be explained by the users' increased resource depletion through cognitive absorption (i.e. the concentration of one's entire affective, cognitive, and physical resources on the task at hand). The results further indicate that engaging with gamified apps indeed affects the situational processing of privacy-related decisions (i.e. calculating benefits vs. risks) and the role of dispositional antecedents: In states of deep cognitive absorption, users disclose even more information when they perceive privacy benefits (i.e., situational) and even less when they have high privacy concerns (i.e., dispositional).

Automated summary

Research indicates that users of gamified apps are more likely to share private information with firms, and their information disclosure decisions are influenced by cognitive absorption.