Life Online: Online Shoppers Will Pay Extra to Protect Privacy, Carnegie Mellon Study Shows
From the announcement:

People are willing to pay extra to buy items from online retailers when they can easily ascertain how retailers’ policies will protect their privacy, a new Carnegie Mellon University study shows.

Participants in the laboratory study used a Carnegie Mellon shopping search engine called Privacy Finder, www.privacyfinder.org, which can automatically evaluate a Web site’s privacy policies and display the results on the search results page. The study, led by Lorrie Cranor, director of the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy and Security (CUPS) Lab, found that people were more likely to buy from online merchants with good privacy policies, which were identified by Privacy Finder. They were also willing to pay about 60 cents extra on a $15 purchase when buying from a site with a privacy policy they liked.

Findings from the study, the first to suggest that people will pay a premium to protect their privacy when shopping online, will be presented Friday, June 8, at the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, an international meeting hosted by Carnegie Mellon that begins Thursday, June 7. In addition to Cranor, the research team included Alessandro Acquisti, assistant professor of information technology and public policy, and graduate students Janice Tsai and Serge Egelman.

See Also: Direct to PrivacyFinder Database
What is PrivacyFinder:

Privacy Finder is a search engine developed by Cranor and her students to address this issue. The engine makes use of the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), a technical standard for creating machine-readable privacy policies. About 10 percent of Web sites overall and more than 20 percent of e-commerce sites now employ P3P, Cranor said, and of the top 100 most-visited Web sites, about a third use P3P. The search engine can automatically read and evaluate the policies of Web sites that employ P3P, and it displays this information as a series of colored squares that indicate to the user whether the site’s privacy policy complies with his or her privacy preferences.

See Also: PrivacyFinder “Custom” Page

See Also: Download Privacy Bird Software

See Also: Read the Full Text of the Paper:
The Effect of Online Privacy Information on Purchasing Behavior: An Experimental Study
35 pages; PDF.

Sources: CMU, 2007 Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, and AScribe

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 12:55 am and is filed under Business and Economics, Databases, Directories, and Guides, New Websites and Resources, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.