Consumer Responses to the Introduction of Privacy Protection Measures: An Exploratory Research Framework

Information privacy is at the center of discussion and controversy among multiple stakeholders including business leaders, privacy activists, and government regulators. However, conceptualizations of information privacy have been somewhat patchy in current privacy literature. In this article, we review the conceptualizations of information privacy through three different lenses (information exchange, social contract and information control), and then try to build upon previous literature from multiple theoretical lenses to create a common understanding of the organization-consumer information interaction in the context of Business-to-Consumer electronic commerce (B2C e-commence). We argue that consumers’ privacy beliefs are influenced by the situational and environmental cues that signal the level of privacy protections in a particular environment. The framework developed in this research should be of interest to academic researchers, e-commerce vendors, legislators, industry self-regulators, and designers of privacy enhancing technologies.