A Study on Online Businesses' Commitment to Consumer Privacy

In today's digital economy, consumers are heavily dependent on online businesses. As consumers browse and purchase products and services online, a trove of data about them is collected by businesses. Consumers need protection from the collection and misuse of their personal information. However, not all businesses are sincere about ensuring consumer privacy online or responsibly handling consumer information. In this paper, we study privacy policies and information practices of a sample of 27 well-known and lesser-known online businesses to understand and explore whether well-known sites have stronger privacy commitment than the lesser-known ones. Our study adaptively reuses the methodology from a similar study done by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1999. Since then, the online businesses have grown manifold; consumer behaviors have changed significantly; and technologies for information capture and data analyses have become so much powerful that consumer privacy is at huge risks, needing this study. This study reveals weak privacy postures and practices of online businesses.