Digital Privacy in the Marketplace

Information Privacy continues to evolve as an important business and public policy issue of our time. This book focuses on privacy issues related to information exchange and use in the online business marketplace. Drawing upon published empirical and theoretical research, the book provides a balanced and insightful overview of this topic from both consumers' and businesses' perspectives. The book's content includes background about the hard to define concept of privacy, with an emphasis on the information exchange process between marketers and consumers. It presents an argument why it is important to manage from both the perspective of the consumer who wants to use information technology to help navigate the digital world as well as businesses that desire to have access to consumer information for their marketing efforts. The nature of information exchange is reviewed, highlighting the inhibitors and promoters of the process. There is a focus on specific harms that can occur and a discussion of the marketing technologies that can lead to these harms. Also there is a review of the forms of privacy protection offered through legal, self-regulatory, and technological avenues and thoughts about the direction of privacy protection in the future. This book is targeted to a wide audience including professors, students at all levels (undergraduate, graduate, and executives), and business managers.