E-Commerce and Privacy: Exploring What We Know and Opportunities for Future Discovery

TLDR

E‑commerce requires personal information for transactions, creating a trade‑off between convenience and privacy risk, making privacy a critical issue that has generated extensive research. The paper identifies future research opportunities for MIS and AIS scholars, including company privacy strategies, customer concerns over tracking and data sharing, privacy‑enhancing technologies from PSPs, and industry‑specific regulations, and urges more experimental and archival studies. The authors organize key research issues using a framework of four stakeholder groups—companies, customers, privacy solution providers, and governments—and their interactions. The review shows that e‑commerce privacy research peaked in the early 2000s and has largely failed to address technological advances and developments of the past decade.

Abstract

ABSTRACT Electronic commerce (e-commerce) has a built-in trade-off between the necessity of providing at least some personal information to consummate an online transaction and the risk of negative consequences from providing such information. This requirement and the increased sophistication of companies' personal information gathering have made e-commerce privacy a critical issue and have spawned a broad research literature that is reviewed in this paper. Key research issues and findings are organized, using a framework defined by four key stakeholder groups—companies, customers, privacy solution providers (PSPs), and governments—as well as the interactions among them. The review indicates that the published research on e-commerce privacy peaked in the early 2000s; thus, it has not addressed many of the technological advances and other relevant developments of the past decade. Potential research opportunities for researchers in Management Information Systems (MIS) and Accounting Information Systems (AIS) include: company privacy strategies, operations, disclosures, and compliance practices; customer privacy concerns arising from company practices such as Internet activity tracking, physical location tracking, personal information gathering by social networks, and information exchanges in cloud computing environments; privacy-enhancing technologies, controls, and assurance practices developed by PSPs; and privacy regulations relating to various industries, countries, and cultures. More use of experimental and archival research is encouraged.