Targeted Ads and Privacy Intrusion: The Anxious Feeling of Being “Always Watched”

Abstract

The current research examines associations between targeted advertising intensity and privacy intrusion perception, with perceived surveillance awareness as a proposed mediator and privacy literacy as a moderator. Leveraging theories from Communication Privacy Management and Psychological Reactance, a conceptual model was tested via partial least squares structural equation modeling using data from a cross-sectional survey of 1,700 social media users from the United States. Multiple techniques were employed to assess common method bias; results suggest that method variance is unlikely to account for the observed structural relationships, though residual bias cannot be fully excluded given the single-source design. Perceived surveillance awareness partially mediates the association between targeting and privacy intrusion (indirect effect β = .316, 95% confidence interval [CI] [.279, .354]), while privacy literacy moderates the link between surveillance awareness and privacy intrusion (β = .089, p < .001), accounting for 52.7% of variance in perceived privacy intrusion. A notable finding is a pattern consistent with a “knowledge paradox,” wherein higher privacy literacy is associated with increased psychological costs of surveillance awareness — a finding that warrants further investigation and replication.