Privacy and Security Threats of Recommendation Systems: Awareness and Perspective of Users of Bangladesh
Bijon Mallik, Samin Yasar, Ahmed Shafkat, Md. Mahbubur Rahman, Dr. Sadia Sharmin · 2025
One of the most significant and ongoing concerns in the field of information management is the leakage of private information through the recommendation system (RecSys). The growing number of platforms that demand personal information from users draws attention to the shortcomings of earlier studies, which mostly concentrated on voluntary information sharing. The user disclosure behaviour for private information that we define in this study involves not only voluntary sharing but also mandatory disclosure. Our concepts clarifies how a user’s inclination to disclose, either naturally or under compulsion, is influenced by context, motivation, personal characteristics, and the benefit-risk ratio. It is based on the Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory. The research finds that user personalization, years of platform use, and perceived benefits are main drivers of voluntary disclosure whereas age, privacy policy, and perceived risks are drivers of mandatory disclosure. One of the most intriguing findings is that perceived risk plays a very limited role in voluntary sharing, contrary to conclusions advanced in the prior literature. This implies that websites that try to promote voluntary disclosure should place greater emphasis on optimizing perceived benefits than on attempting to reduce perceived risks. Our research adds to the body of knowledge and creates new opportunities for scholars and platforms using recommendation system since it is the first to categorise and compare the ways in which Recommendation System users disclose private information.