Consequently, privacy-focused technologies (PFTs) emerge to provide personalized privacy protection and to wrestle control over personal information back to users (Rainie, 2018). However, this objective opposes the operations of most online organizations, particularly the commerce and other service providing organizations. The magnitude of disruption being introduced by the Inrupt privacy technologies can generate conflicting trade-offs between users and online vendors (Rainie, 2018). Because user data is a highly sought after commodity, PFTs threaten to curtail online organization’s access to these data (Cho, Kim & Lee, 2014). It is as if a digital civil war is underway, and the online service industry is the collateral damage. Many organizations online now exchange some services for user information. For instance, in exchange for some freebies, or premium service users are to sign up with contact information as email address, name among other personal information (Suppiah, Mohd, & Fahmi, 2016). Users in many cases a left to do the privacy calculus for such offers (Kim, Park, Park, & Ahn, 2019; Zhu, Ou, van den Heuvel, & Liu, 2017). This situation may drive users into a state of exhaustion or fatigue with online services (Choi, Park & Jung, 2018). Fatigue describes a prolonged emotional and physical exhaustion with a task or condition and characterized by reduced self-efficacy (Choi et al., 2018; Bol, et al 2018). Choi et al, (2018) asserts that privacy fatigue depicts exhaustion with a constant lack of privacy assurance, because users perceive no effective means of ensuring their privacy. Linking this to the phenomena of exchanging personal information for an e-service or some level of access online, can cause fatigue. To constantly do the privacy calculus of accessing a service makes it a mental task that needs attention (Bol et al., 2018). For instance, in recent, some online organizations require users to alter their privacy settings to allow certain privileges including, access for cookies and location information (Luqman, et al., 2017). In essence, users must trade-in personal information in return for usability which may unfortunately leave users with limited options other than compliance. This then presents a situation of no effective means of dealing with possible privacy risks arising from such a decision. The state of exhaustion emanating from such situations describes the phenomenon of usage fatigue conceptualized in this study. In simple terms, it reflects a state of exhaustion toward forfeiting personal protection and information for an online resource use.
The prevalence of fatigue among online consumers currently requires attention from research and practice (Choi et al., 2018). Little is known about the antecedents of the phenomena (Choi et al., 2018), particularly in the online commerce context. Because fatigue is characterized by withdrawal behaviour, its increase highlights user disengagement (Widjaja et al., 2019), thus, posing adverse consequences for online organizations. The phenomenon of usage fatigue although quite new can become prevalent. Thus far, its actual role and antecedents need empirical conceptualization. To contribute to this gap in literature, this study purposes to elucidate the antecedents of usage fatigue and empirically investigate if usage fatigue influences online commerce decrease.