A Survey of Consumer Information Privacy from the Accounting Information Systems Perspective

Abstract

The information privacy of consumers is an important public policy issue in today's society, and one that businesses, industries, and governments are continuing to struggle with as information technology (IT) innovations create ever-stronger impacts. In this article, we explore consumer information privacy issues and review the results of related prior research. We provide a survey of the literature on information privacy based on our assessment from: (1) the societal and public policy perspective, (2) the business practices perspective, and (3) the individual privacy and consumer behavior perspectives that relate to the disclosure of private information by individuals to firms. From the societal and public policy perspective, we identify a number of research directions that relate to the social welfare implications of personal information surveillance, the safeguards needed at the societal level, and the nature of privacy-enhancing regulations. From the business practices perspective, we suggest other research directions that involve the examination of factors influencing organizational choices of privacy practices. We also offer some ways to discover how organizations can leverage their investments in information privacy. The individual and consumer behavior perspective, in turn, prompts Accounting Information Systems (AIS) researchers to look at the nature of people's beliefs and attitudes about privacy; the ways such attitudes affect their intentions and behaviors; and how individuals' behaviors can be influenced by organizational privacy policies and practices. The main contribution of this article is to understand these issues and identify opportunities for AIS researchers to enrich the current body of knowledge on this critical topic.

E-Commerce and Privacy: Exploring What We Know and Opportunities for Future Discovery

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Understanding the Components of Information Privacy Threats for Location-Based Services

“…Given recent research that calls for studies in the area of privacy, including consumer attitudes and beliefs regarding privacy, the present study proposes and validates a conceptual model that weighs the relative importance of different types of consumer privacy concerns related to location-based services on behavioral intentions (Kauffman, Lee, Prosch, and Steinbart 2011). The resultant findings indicate the importance of unraveling the intricacies related to the specific components of privacy concerns and their relative weight on consumer intentions to disclose.…”

Data Mining of Electronic Mail and Auditing: A Research Agenda

“…Privacy is an important ongoing public policy and research area (Kauffman et al 2011). U.S. courts have long indicated that emails that reside on the company's computers belong to the company and that employees generally have no privacy protection (Gubins 2008;Smith and Tabak 2009).…”