Abstract/Summary

Disclosure of personal information online has raised concerns about individuals’ privacy. In order to protect personal information users undertake measures, such as configuring privacy settings and referring to the privacy policies of the organisation’s website before engaging in a transaction. This demonstrates users’ concerns with the availability of their personal information online. Besides the individuals themselves, organisations are also exposing the personal information of their staff to the general public by publishing it on their official website. The practice of publishing employees’ information on such websites is nominally to offer better services to customers, and it is one of the steps taken to improve governmental transparency. However, there are only limited studies on individuals’ (i.e. employees’) privacy issues in the context of organisational disclosure, and their internal responses to the relevant factors. To date, far too little attention has been paid to the disclosure of personal information by organisational websites. This research addresses this phenomenon, where the issue of third-party disclosure by an entity that has a direct relationship with the individuals is investigated in the Malaysian context. For this purpose, this research introduces ‘obligatory disclosure’ as a conceptual framework for this study and adds to the knowledge of privacy-in-public in the context of public administration. The results of the study indicate that while obligatory disclosure was commonly believed to be a normal phenomenon, it creates a vulnerable environment for individuals. The study also found that employees’ concerns with privacy were influenced by the specific context. In addition, low levels of privacy concern and lack of privacy awareness regarding this phenomenon were identified. The study recommends that there is a need for a regulatory approach to protect employees’ information on organisation websites, and privacy should be incorporated as an important element of obligatory disclosure practice.