A study of the effects of programmatic advertising on users' concerns about privacy overtime

This research work has two objectives. On the one hand, to analyze the influence that Perceived Usefulness of Programmatic Advertising (PA) has on the user's Concern about Privacy, and on the other, to check whether this relationship changes over time. That is, to find out how improvements in the effectiveness of programmatic advertising might increase the users' concern for privacy. Today, programmatic advertising can be very invasive, not only because of the use of cookies and geolocation, but also because of using algorithms that analyze users' interests in order to offer related products at a later date when the user visits other different websites which are not at all related to the first. Secondly, this document investigates whether this relationship increases over time and if there are any time-related effects. In this study, data from of a very large sample of Internet users in Spain (n = 14,822) was analyzed at three different moments of time between 2013 and 2017. PLS-SEM was used for the analysis given its usefulness in social studies. Several groups were analyzed to test the difference between the path coefficients of the latent variables at different moments in time. Academics and professionals will benefit from this document by being able to see the importance of this relationship over time and how it changes. The use of a longitudinal study allowed for an investigation into, not only the existence of the relationship, but how it changed over the years.