IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/igg/jisp00/v3y2009i4p68-95.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do You Know Where Your Data Is? A Study of the Effect of Enforcement Strategies on Privacy Policies

Author

Listed:
  • Ian Reay

    (University of Alberta, Canada)

  • Patricia Beatty

    (University of Alberta, Canada)

  • Scott Dick

    (University of Alberta, Canada)

  • James Miller

    (University of Alberta, Canada)

Abstract

Numerous countries around the world have enacted privacy-protection legislation, in an effort to protect their citizens and instill confidence in the valuable business-to-consumer E-commerce industry. These laws will be most effective if and when they establish a standard of practice that consumers can use as a guideline for the future behavior of e-commerce vendors. However, while privacy-protection laws share many similarities, the enforcement mechanisms supporting them vary hugely. Furthermore, it is unclear which (if any) of these mechanisms are effective in promoting a standard of practice that fits with the social norms of those countries. We present a large-scale empirical study of the role of legal enforcement in standardizing privacy protection on the Internet. Our study is based on an automated analysis of documents posted on the 100,000 most popular websites (as ranked by Alexa.com). We find that legal frameworks have had little success in creating standard practices for privacy-sensitive actions.

Suggested Citation

  • Ian Reay & Patricia Beatty & Scott Dick & James Miller, 2009. "Do You Know Where Your Data Is? A Study of the Effect of Enforcement Strategies on Privacy Policies," International Journal of Information Security and Privacy (IJISP), IGI Global, vol. 3(4), pages 68-95, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:igg:jisp00:v:3:y:2009:i:4:p:68-95
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://services.igi-global.com/resolvedoi/resolve.aspx?doi=10.4018/jisp.2009100105
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:igg:jisp00:v:3:y:2009:i:4:p:68-95. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Journal Editor (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.igi-global.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.