Strength of Privacy Policy Statements and Consumer Trust

Abstract

Privacy policy statements are one of the more commonly used techniques to alleviate consumers’ concerns about information privacy which is generally considered to be one of the primary obstacles to the success of e-commerce. This exploratory study examined the willingness of individuals to provide various types of personal information given varying degrees of protection offered by privacy policy statements. The results demonstrated that the willingness to provide information to web merchants increased as the level of privacy guaranteed by the statements increased. More interestingly, increasing levels of privacy promised by the statements had the greatest influence on individuals with prior familiarity with policy statements. The results also demonstrated that while most individuals were aware of privacy policy statements, less than half of the respondents had ever read a privacy statement.