As information technologies increasingly expand the ability for organizations to store, process, and exploit personal data, privacy is at the center of discussion and controversy among multiple stakeholders including business leaders, privacy activists, and government regulators. Studies suggest that the loss of consumer confidence related to privacy fears has already hindered the growth of Bus...

Firms increasingly use consumers’ information to personalize their communication. Personalized advertisements, targeted based on users’ past behavior, offer users relevant product information that fits their preferences. In this study, we investigate the implications of explicit targeting, making the underlying targeting mechanism explicit to consumers, and ad message framing, in terms of utili...

One of major considerations in an online business is customer privacy. Consumers are not interested in being monitored and identified by sellers. Some solutions are proposed to hide selection of the customer but in the payment phase, there will be a leakage of information as online shopper can infer some information about customer’s preference due to the price, which is paid by customer. This i...

The stringent requirement of the demand-supply equilibrium for delivering electricity has traditionally been dealt with a supply-side perspective, assuming that the demand is not alterable. With the promises of the Smart Grid, demandside management techniques are increasingly becoming more feasible. A demand-side management technique, called Demand Response, aims at inducing changes in electric...

This article investigates the conflicting area of user benefits arising through item level RFID tagging and a desire for privacy. It distinguishes between three approaches feasible to address consumer privacy concerns. One is to kill RFID tags at store exits. The second is to lock tags and have user unlock them if they want to initiate reader communication (user scheme). The third is to let the...

U.S. teens are spending substantial time on social networking sites (SNSs). Yet, only a few studies have documented teens’ privacy-protecting behaviors on SNSs. Using data of Facebook teen users and their parents in the U.S. from the Pew Internet’s Teens & Privacy Management Survey (N = 622), this study investigated the socialization agents of teens’ level of online privacy concern, and the rel...

In this paper, we consider the protocol which prevents the service provider from finding out which customer have bought what kind of contents by the unlinkability between the payment and user-profile information. Besides, we do not employ any kind of anonymous payment system causing more computation complexities and overheads to the network, and our approach can be easily applied into the curre...

This paper explores how digitization and the associated use of customer data have affected the evolution of consumer privacy concerns. We measure privacy concerns by reluctance to disclose income in an online marketing research survey. Using over three million responses over eight years, our data show: (1) Refusals to reveal information have risen over time, (2) Older people are less likely to ...

When online social networks change privacy control features (i.e. methods of sharing consumer information), the result is often media attention and public outcry. Facebook introduced new privacy controls in 2009 causing the Electronic Frontier Foundation to accuse them of pushing users to disclose more information than ever before. However, there is little research to indicate that such practic...

Currently, the casual consumer has few available resources on product security and privacy with which to inform purchasing decisions. This absence of coherent information becomes increasingly important as we incorporate an increasing level of sensors, actuators, and connectivity into the technologies in our homes. We wish to initiate a discussion on the potential utility of an organized entity ...