From Privacy Concern to Strategic Resistance: A Dual-Pathway Model of Power-Enhancing Responses in Digital Banking

This study investigates the psychological mechanisms through which information privacy concerns translate into power-enhancing responses—strategic consumer behaviors including information falsification, technological countermeasures deployment, and disclosure refusal—in digital banking contexts. Drawing on the Antecedent-Privacy Concern-Outcome (APCO) framework, Concern for Information Privacy (CFIP) theory, and Power-Responsibility Equilibrium perspective, we develop and test an integrated model specifying dual mediation pathways: an affective pathway through perceived data vulnerability and an evaluative pathway through negative attitudes toward information practices. Survey data from 251 active digital banking users in Vietnam were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Results reveal that all four CFIP dimensions—Collection, Secondary Use, Unauthorized Access, and Errors—significantly predict overall privacy concern, with Errors concerns exhibiting the strongest effect (β = 0.319). The model explains 88.7% of variance in power-enhancing responses, demonstrating that privacy concerns operate through both direct cognitive pathways (β = 0.326) and indirect pathways via perceived vulnerability (β = 0.379) and negative attitudes (β = 0.269). Perceived vulnerability emerges as the critical affective mechanism, with overall concern strongly predicting vulnerability (β = 0.577), which then catalyzes defensive behaviors. These findings resolve the privacy paradox by demonstrating that privacy concerns predict consequential behaviors through sophisticated resistance mechanisms rather than simple disclosure decisions. The study contributes to privacy theory by specifying the psychological architecture linking cognitive concerns to behavioral outcomes and offers practical guidance for financial institutions seeking to prevent invisible data contamination through information falsification.