Would Regulation of Web Site Privacy Policy Statements Increase Consumer Trust?

Abstract

Proponents of e-commerce have known for some time that limited participation by consumers partially reflects their concern over the privacy of personal information. To address consumer concerns, web site operators have employed security mechanisms, including privacy policy statements to increase their perceived trustworthiness. While empirical evidence is limited, there is some question regarding the ability of privacy policy statements to engender significantly greater levels of trust. The limited effectiveness of such statements may reflect their voluntary implementation, self-enforcement, and\or significant variance (protection and enforcement) from one web site to another. One possible remedy would be the imposition of legally mandated statements. This study examined the efficacy of legally mandated privacy policies vis-à-vis both voluntary statements of varying degrees of protection and the absence of any such statement. The results were mixed, as legally mandated privacy policy statements were found to be comparable to strong voluntary statements, but superior to none, weak or moderate policies. Perhaps more important, the nature of the privacy policy statement interacted with type of information requested.

Trust and information privacy concerns in electronic government

“…Although this survey reveals that not all respondents read online privacy statements, confirming results of previous studies (Arcand et al, 2007;Jensen et al, 2005;Meinert et al, 2004), it is worth noting that respondents consider the availability and the accessibility or findability of a privacy statement as indicators of a municipality's trustworthiness in terms of how it uses and processes users' personal data. The presence and the ease of finding an online privacy statement are sufficient to prompt most respondents to disclose requested personal data.…”

“…Although it is also known that most Internet users do not bother to read privacy statements (Arcand et al, 2007;Jensen, Potts, & Jensen, 2005;Meinert, et al, 2004;, they are most likely to trust organizations that post privacy statements on their websites (Pan & Zinkhan, 2006) and would feel greater control over their personal data when shared to organizations with websites that post privacy statements (Arcand et la., 2007). Aside from online privacy statements, Internet seals of approval from third-party certifying organizations, which help in endorsing organizational policies on privacy and security, have also been found to improve users' positive evaluation of the privacy practices of online organizations behind websites with those seals (Miyazaki & Krishnamurthy, 2002) and to encourage online information disclosure (LaRose & Rifon, 2007).…”

“…Although privacy statements are seldom never read or consulted (Arcand et al, 2007;Beldad, De Jong, & Steehouder, 2010;Jensen, Potts, & Jensen, 2005;Meinert et al, 2004;Myerscough, Lowe, & Alpert, 2006), their mere presence on a website could already influence users' trust in an online organization (Lauer & Deng, 2007;Meinert et al, 2004;Pan & Zinkhan, 2006) and increase the assessed dependability of the organization (Schoenbachler & Gordon, 2002). However, Internet users must have confidence in online privacy statements first before the aforementioned documents can increase users' trust in organizations behind those websites.…”

“…Studies have shown that even if online privacy statements are not read or consulted (Arcand et al, 2007;Jensen et al, 2005;Meinert et al, 2004;, their mere presence would be enough to win users' conviction that an online organization can be trusted (Meinert et al, 2004;Pan & Zinkhan, 2006). Studies have also demonstrated that privacy statements are instrumental to the collection of accurate information from users (Xie, Teo, &Wan, 2006) and vital for establishing the credibility of websites (Sheehan, 2005).…”

Tracking website data-collection and privacy practices with the iWatch web crawler

“…Given that studies have shown that users fail to read sites' privacy policies [22,27], the kinds of minimum protections these laws put in place are particularly important. Previous research has shown that legislation can have mixed effects on policies, especially their readability and usability [3,22].…”