Online privacy concerns in transactions
Hackers can track you even when you’re home on your own and using your favorite social media app or browsing the web. While some may argue that the lack privacy in our modern digital lives is inevitable, it doesn’t mean that we have to give up on protecting our privacy online and our rights to protect it. Reclaiming our privacy requires making informed choices about what apps, sites, and devices we use, which software solutions to ensure our security, and pressing the institutions that govern us to enforce consumer and data protection laws.
The current trend towards offering users the ability to «opt-in» to having their personal information collected and used to market purposes can cause tension between the desire for communication with family and friends online and a sense of protection of one’s privacy in a digital world (Woo, 2006). Additionally, users often are forced to provide their personal information to access websites or services. They are also exposed to a vast amount of information on what companies do with their data. Many people are overwhelmed by the volume of information available, and are less likely to be able to comprehend the vast privacy policies for companies on the internet, which have become increasingly legalistic.
Although research has examined a variety of factors that contribute to online privacy, the results are inconsistent and have been conducted in a disjointed manner. In this study, an integrated model is presented that explains how online privacy concerns are formulated by examining the interaction of diverse factors within the context of a two-way communication between a person’s identity and the website. The results suggest that the factors that influence the pop over to this web-site privacy of a person are their sensibility to privacy issues as well as their risk-aversion personality and level of Internet knowledge. The interaction between these factors and the person’s perception of fairness when it comes to their privacy online options mitigates the effects.