An Empirical Study of Internet Privacy Protection and Trust Marks

10.29709/ecmanagement.201005.0001

林裕哲(Yue-Jer Lin)

Internet Privacy Protection ； Fair Information Practices ； Trust marks

電子化企業經營管理理論暨實務研討會

第11屆（2010 / 05 / 29）

1 - 10

英文

The aim of this study was to identify the Internet privacy protection and realize the relationship of between use of trust marks and the quality of the privacy statement for websites. First of all, this study applied four criteria of notice, access, choice and security that were identified by the FTC as Fair Information Practice to assess over 650 Web sites for the quality of Internet privacy. The results clarified that there were extreme contrasts between different industries and companies. Also, there was much diversity in design for Internet privacy and security between sites. The analysis disclosed that Internet privacy may still be regarded as immature for most businesses. Second, this study also conducted surveys with several trust seals that have been used frequently from Websites, including SOSA, TWCA, TRUSTe, HiTrust/VeriSign, BBB Online, and Verified by VISA. Analyses indicated that 30% of the websites used a trustmark, and that HiTrust/VeriSign was the most common trustmark used by businesses, particularly in the industry of airlines, travels, and bookstores. The preferred trustmark varied by industry, with sports websites preferring Verified by VISA, real estate websites preferring SOSA, telecommunication websites preferring HiTrust/VeriSign, and travel websites preferring TWCA. However, BBB Online was never displayed and TRUSTe was displayed very uncommonly. Point-biserial correlations were computed between whether or not a website used a trust mark and scores on the four criteria. The point biserial correlations were computed within each industry and for the combined sample of websites. Results indicated that there were no relationships between the use of trust marks and the notice criterion. However, there were very strong relationships between the use of trust marks and the access and choice criteria for all industries and overall.