Smartphones and mobile applications have become an integral part of our everyday lives as technology consumers. Adverse incidents in the past, such as data security breaches or subtle data-based manipulations show that an increased privacy awareness is an important feature of a democratic system. Fear appeal research, applied initially to clinical contexts, provides a useful conceptual framework to tackle this attentional gap. The idea of fear/threat appeals directed at changing a person’s motivation is thereby transferred to threats that might result from insufficient data protection efforts. We conducted an online experiment among Austrian students (n=81) that aimed at understanding the effect of a short threat appeal intervention (touching the three topics of mass manipulation, social credit systems, and surveillance capitalism) on both general privacy concerns and more specific mobile users' privacy concerns. Regression and moderation analyses were conducted to test central hypotheses. Within the experimental group, higher vertical – that is institution-related – privacy concerns could be observed. General horizontal or smartphone usage-related privacy concerns were unrelated to the threat appeal intervention. Conspiracy mentality, general trust, and belief in a just world did not moderate the former relationships. The absence of an experimental effect on reported mobile privacy concerns is noteworthy, as it indicates that the experimental subjects might have perceived these issues as unrelated. Future appeals aimed at promoting an elaborate understanding of how privacy risks relate to the mobile sphere clearly need to address the societal and political dimensions of this technology in greater detail.