Abstract
The purposes of this study are to examine the influence of companies' usage of “context of use” data on consumers' perceived unpleasantness and to give an outline of the emergent ethical problem related to marketing research. The result of statistical analysis on survey data shows that the way of data use tends to have an effect on the level of unpleasantness perceived by consumers; in particular, provision of the data to a third-party company fairly increases the level of the perceived unpleasantness; and a previous notice of provision and level of trust of the third-party seem to moderate increasing of unpleasantness. As IoT makes companies know how consumers use their products on a real-time basis, these findings seem to imply that the soundness of data treatment should be included in management diagnostics and development of the indexes of such soundness is needed.
