期刊名称：Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline
印刷版ISSN：1547-9684
电子版ISSN：1521-4672
出版年度：2006
卷号：9
页码：123-142
出版社：Informing Science Institute
摘要：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-¨¤-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.
关键词：e-commerce privacy: electronic commerce trust; Internet privacy; Internet trust;
online privacy; privacy policy statements
