مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد حفظ حریم خصوصی اطلاعات تجارت اینترنتی – الزویر 2018

There is a disconnect between how information privacy is handled by Internet Commerce firms and what individuals care about. Many organizations have simply gone ahead and instituted policies that are counterproductive to maintaining the privacy of individuals. Hence it is important to develop some guidance to strategically ensure information privacy in the context of Internet Commerce. In this paper we develop information privacy objectives and present a model of fundamental and means objectives. The measurement scale is useful for researchers and marketers alike since it allows to assess consumer attitudes about how privacy influences behavior. The objectives and the scale also help companies to define their information privacy policies better. The importance of individual information privacy concerns in Internet Commerce gained significant attention around the 1999-2000-time frame when the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) first brought public attention to Doubleclick’s proposed business practices for infringement of privacy in an online environment. In 2000, EPIC filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging privacy violations1 . At that time DoubleClick had conceded that it respects the privacy of individuals by not connecting personal information with online browsing data. Subsequently, DoubleClick was sold to Epsilon in 2006, and then to Google in 2007. In 2013 Google DoubleClick announced that they would be replacing cookies, a forte of DoubleClick, with a unique personal identifier, which would help track consumer movement on the Internet, and thus help Google target advertising more precisely. From an Internet Commerce perspective, two interesting and confounding issues emerge. First, since 1999, not much has changed in the world of privacy in terms of what Internet Commerce firms should do to protect the privacy of their constituents. Companies such as DoubleClick are engaging in exactly the same practices that they were in 1999. Internet Commerce vendors have not taken any concrete steps to either understand consumer concerns about privacy or to ensure adequate protection. Second, consumers may have a limited understanding of what they need to protect and how such protection can be brought about. Many a times, measures taken by consumers are extreme and detrimental to the purpose of Internet Commerce. For example, in the light of recent revelation about surveillance and collection of personal information, Pew research found that 91% of consumers agree that they have lost control of how their information is collected and used by companies. Among a sample of 1002 adults, 86% of internet users have removed or masked their digital footprint, whereas 55% of users have taken steps to avoid being observed by people, organizations or the government. At the same time, many express desire to take additional steps for protecting their information2 . What consumers really require is a delicate balance between too much exposure and disconnecting entirely (Dwoskin, 2014; Turban, et al., 2018). These examples reveal that there is a lack of importance of a strategic orientation in the context of Internet Privacy.