Online privacy, government surveillance and national ID cards

Introduction This study explores whether internet users' concerns for personal information privacy, principally manifested as online privacy, are related to their attitudes to government surveillance and national ID cards (often perceived as a surveillance tool). This is a relationship which needs to be explored in-depth because of three concurrent trends -- first, the push towards e-government, where citizen-government transactions are increasingly conducted online; second, the growing use of smart cards, RFID tags and other portable information collection and transmission devices by governments and businesses; and third, calls for greater government surveillance, both online and offline, to counter terrorism in the post 9/11 environment. While prior research has dealt with individual concerns about online privacy and individual concerns about government surveillance, studies exploring the relationship between the two are limited. This study seeks to fill that gap by surveying Internet users across five cities which vary in their experience of government surveillance and the use of national ID cards -- Bangalore, New York, Seoul, Singapore and Sydney. Personal information privacy is the individual's ability to personally control information about him/herself. Such information could include anything from one's birth registration details, to the identities and coordinates of one's next-of-kin, income and expenditure patterns and even health records. In countries where day-to-day transactions with commercial and government entities are increasingly being conducted online, involving the electronic collection of personal information, online privacy is the principal manifestation of personal information privacy. As e-commerce and e-government services become more pervasive, Internet users' concerns about online privacy are likely to grow. Individual online privacy concerns have been classified into improper acquisition, improper use and privacy invasion.12 Concerns about improper acquisition relate to unauthorized access to personal information, improper collection of one's private information and improper monitoring of consumers' online activities. Concerns about improper use cover unauthorised analysis of consumers' online shopping behavior and the subsequent business-to-business transfer of such analyses. Concerns about privacy invasion refer to the transmission of information to Internet users without their prior consent, such as spam, as well as the improper storage of personal information. To maintain their online privacy, Internet users can engage in self-protective behaviour such as opting out, using privacy enhancing technologies, reading privacy policies, or checking trust marks. Studies have been conducted to test concern about online privacy as a function of demographic variables. Sheehan10 found that gender was a significant factor in that female consumers were generally more concerned about their personal privacy than male consumers. In general, older consumers2 were also more concerned about online privacy. The relationship between consumers' experience with the Internet and online privacy concerns has also been explored. Bellman et al.2 reported that consumers' online privacy concerns diminished with Internet experience. As more consumers use the Internet and the average level of experience rises, online privacy concerns should gradually diminish. In general, studies have demonstrated that demographic variables and Internet-related experiences significantly affect Internet users' concern about online privacy.