Exploring Privacy Risks in Information Networks

In our society, the Internet becomes more and more indispensable, and the issue of personal information between consumers and businesses is recognised as critically important in building secure and efficient systems over the Internet. With respect to the treatment of personal information, consumers generally want their privacy to be protected, but businesses need reliable personal information and an access channel to reach consumers for e-commerce. Undoubtedly, these demands must be satisfied to establish sound e-commerce. However, with the technologies available today it is reasonably easy for companies to gather information about consumers in order to make personalised offers through e-mail. There is a fine line between collecting personal information to make customised offers that users or customers regard as useful information and what is an intrusion to personal privacy. In this paper, we discuss how consumer privacy is affected by unsolicited e-mail messages sent with a commercial purpose (spam). We found that, albeit most of the investigated web sites behaved well, a small fraction generated a large number of spam. This Tragedy of the Commons problem is discussed from an economical, ethical and legislative point of view.