Privacy Policies Considerations in Socio-Technical Systems

The idea of a socio-technical system (STS) is an intellectual tool to help recognize patterns in the way technology is used and produced. Identification of these patterns will help in analyzing the ethical issues associated with the technology-and-its-social-system [1]. By way of example, consider a relatively simple technology: a set of twenty laptops connected by a local area network. The social and ethical issues associated with these networked devices will change dramatically depending upon the socio-technical system in which they are embedded. Few technologies have ever had the capability of gathering information (with or without the user’s knowledge) as effectively as the World Wide Web. Internet has the greatest potential of targeting precise marketing demographics. Internet is also capable of disseminating information widely and quickly. This paper will study the role of privacy policies in web based socio-technical systems. This paper will research the role played by privacy policies in web user adaptation in the context of web based sociotechnical systems.