Opportunities and challenges of mobile personalization: An exploratory study

In the decade since the creation of wireless handheld devices, mobile commerce (m-commerce) has become a ubiquitous channel for accessing information and conducting business. Mobile users can now access information anytime and anywhere. Mobile advertising, retailing, and gambling are popular, and gradually the competition among mobile services providers turns fierce. Hence, some services providers adopt personalization technologies to customize content for their users. This paper explores the opportunities and challenges of the use of personalization technologies in m-commerce. Although the effectiveness of personalization on the web is well-examined, there is little work on personalization in mobile services. The debates regarding the effectiveness of personalization and technological limitations and privacy concerns motivate us to conduct focus groups with mobile users, and explore the opportunities and challenges of personalized mobile services. The focus groups findings illustrate that mobile users are very concerned about their privacy and spam. We then extract a list of personal information from the focus groups findings. This list of personal information is highly related to mobile users' privacy concerns. We conduct an online survey to gain a better understanding of which piece of information mobile users are more willing to share with services providers and we perform a multi-dimensional scale analysis.