Privacy in Ebusiness

Protection of Consumers’ Privacy in e-business
Privacy is the information that an individual want to keep private, not accessible to the public (Buchanan et al, 2007), for example one’s age, weight, birthday, code of the bank account, obsession over the girl in history class and etc. While the protection of consumers’ privacy in usual forms of e-business, like online-shopping and online-booking has become more and more mature and reliable, there is growing concern about the privacy safety in social networking e-business. This problem is quite distinctive and knotty because it involves the protection in social networks while the purpose of socializing is to share privacy. Additionally, the records of users’ hobbies and taste seem very attractive and almost irresistible to advertising companies. This essay tends to give a brief view of these problems, explore their sources and give some possible solutions.
The very central cause of the problem is the two conflictive purposes caged in this one box, the desire to share personal information when socializing and protect them at the same time. In ordinary face-to-face socializing, people will simply determine how much private information others can know based on how close and familiar they are. But the lack of effective categorizing techniques on social networks results in high transparency of one’s private information if once be uploaded. In additional, the extremely high spreading speed of news and people’s natural favour for gossips make it hardly possible to prevent one’s privacy learning by others, even whom one might consider very improper. What makes it worse is that there are more and more hackers and their new “tricks” to hack in an individual’s system and steal the privacy.
The other uprising problem is consumer privacy leakage on commercial purposes. As the arising awareness the acceptation among ads companies to use consumer privacy analysis as a tool to achieve a higher efficient advertising level (Bush... [continues]

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