Privacy online and New Zealand businesses : an investigation of the privacy statements posted by web sites listed in the New Zealand Yellow Pages Directory

Abstract

With the rapid development of the World Wide Web over the past decade, many businesses have seized the opportunities it offers them to market their products to a global audience. Initially web sites were little more than online brochures advertising the company, but increasingly commercial sites are collecting information and feedback from visitors to their web sites, taking bookings or orders online and in some cases collecting payment via credit card. The number of business transactions conducted this way is set to increase once consumers are confident they can use this medium without putting their privacy at risk, and that financial transactions are secure. The research proposed here will investigate the issue of online privacy. The security of financial transactions is a separate issue. One of the means that has been used to assess the state of online privacy is to evaluate the privacy statements posted on web sites. Such statements should notify the user of the site how any information supplied by them will be treated by the owner of the site. It has been shown in the United States that surveys of the privacy practices of commercial web sites can be effective in encouraging businesses to improve the way they handle personal information. The survey done by the Progress and Freedom Foundation in December 2001 (Adkinson, Eisenach, and Lenard 2002) p18 showed an improvement in the relevance and completeness of privacy statements on ".com" web sites over the results found by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in a similar survey in May 2000(Pitofsky et al. 2000). This improvement was attributed to publicity resulting from the first survey.