The Study for Consent of Personal Biometric Information Collection & Usage Agreement and Proposing Conceptual Model for Service Customization Based on User Biometric Information*

Purpose:In the 21st century, the online shopping market is continuously growing because of developing the information and communication technology. The mobile commerce has given various benefits to their customers such as easy access to the online market anytime and anywhere. However, in return for that, companies in online shopping cannot get information, obtained through verbal or non-verbal interactions with consumers from the offline market. Therefore, this study proposes a conceptual model for service customization that can collect and combine biometric information and click-data from mobile shopping apps. If this conceptual model is realized, obtaining consent from consumers for collecting and using biometric information may appear as an important barrier. Therefore, this study aims to examine how to obtain consumer consent for biometric information effectively. Research design, data, and methodology:The purpose of the experiment is to examine how consumers evaluate the bio-information-based service development model and how much they agree with consent for the use of bio-information. To this end, a between-subject experimental design is used with two independent variables; purpose of bio-information utilization (health care, marketing, personalized service development) and regulatory focus (promotion focus, prevention focus). A total of 300 people participated in the online experiment, and after excluding outliers and unfaithful respondents, data from 279 participants were analyzed. Results:The result of the analysis shows that when the consent to use personal information and the consent to collect and use biometric information were requested, the experimental participants responded negatively for marketing purposes, compared to other purposes. The interaction effect between the regulatory focus and the purpose of using personal information and biometric information was significant. Under the health management or personalized service development condition, there was no difference between the promotion-focused and the prevention-focused participants in the intention for consent. Under the marketing purpose, however, the prevention-focused participants showed more negative responses than the promotion-focused. Conclusions:This study presented a conceptual model that can measure and manage consumers