Disentangling the relation among trust, efficacy and privacy management: A moderated mediation analysis of public support for government surveillance during the Covid-19 pandemic

Using a representative survey conducted among 1135 Hong Kong residents, this study explored the underlying mechanism of the effects of privacy calculus (i.e., perceived cost and benefit of disclosure), political attitudes (i.e., political trust, political efficacy) on public support for government surveillance, as mediated by citizens' self-control over privacy management (i.e., privacy self-efficacy) and trust in data controllers (i.e., privacy trust). The study bridged privacy management and public opinion studies, and provided valuable insights on the public opinion of Hong Kong society on government surveillance amidst the political restructuration in recent years.

A series of ordinary least squares hierarchical regression models were used to test the total and direct effects of privacy calculus, political attitudes on surveillance support, as well as their direct effects on the mediators, with demographical information, news media use and perceived threat of Covid-19 infection controlled as covariates. Our results indicated that privacy self-efficacy and privacy trust balance against each other in mediating privacy calculus and political attitudes’ effects on surveillance support.

The analysis of the total effects shows that both perceived benefit of disclosure (B = .435, SE = .036, p < .001) and political trust (B = .409, SE = .041, p < .001) exert positive effects on surveillance support, internal political efficacy exert a negative effect (B = - .052, SE = .019, p < .01) on surveillance support; while perceived cost of disclosure and external political efficacy barely show any effect on surveillance support.

The mediation analysis using PROCESS macro (Model 4) in R with 10,000 bias-corrected bootstrap samples tested the indirect effects of above factors on surveillance support. The results indicated that the effects of perceived benefit and political trust are partially mediated by privacy trust (perceived benefit: B = .160, SE = .023, 95% CI = [.116, .208] ; political trust: B =.300, SE = .032, 95% CI [.240, .366] ) and privacy self-efficacy (perceived benefit: B = .018, SE = .007, 95% CI = [.005, .033]; political trust: B = .014, SE = .007, 95% CI [.002, .030]) ; while internal political efficacy shows no indirect effect on surveillance support. Interestingly, as privacy trust (B = .433, SE =.032, p < .001) and selfefficacy (B = - .119, SE = .025, p < .001) shows strong while opposite direct effects on surveillance support, the indirect effects of political trust and perceived benefit work by enhancing privacy trust while suppressing privacy self-efficacy. It is also noteworthy that external political efficacy shows a negative indirect effect (B = - .012, SE = .004, 95% CI [-.021, -.005]) on surveillance support through its positive effect on privacy self-efficacy, despite of its insignificant total effect.

The moderated mediation analysis using PROCESS macro (Model 59) further explored the conditional role of perceived threat of Covid-19 infection and pro-democracy news media use in this process. The results indicated that while perceived threat only strengthens the direct effect of perceived benefit on surveillance support, pro-democracy media use mitigates the positive indirect effects of political trust, perceived benefit, as well as external political efficacy (mediated by privacy trust) on surveillance support.

Conditioning external political efficacy’s effects on different levels of pro-democracy media use yielded noteworthy results as well: while its negative indirect effect on surveillance support via privacy self-efficacy remains unchanged, external political efficacy shows a positive indirect effect on surveillance support through privacy trust when conditioned in low level (- 1 SD) of pro-democracy media use (B =. 227, SE = .036, 95% CI = [.162, .300]), which is mitigated and reversed to negative when pro-democracy media use is increased to the high level (+1 SD). The opposite indirect effects of external political efficacy on surveillance support via the two mediators reveals its dual focus in nurturing both trust and control in privacy management.