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

Ian Reay, Patricia Beatty, Scott Dick and James Miller
Additional contact information
Ian Reay: University of Alberta, Canada
Patricia Beatty: University of Alberta, Canada
Scott Dick: University of Alberta, Canada
James Miller: University of Alberta, Canada

International Journal of Information Security and Privacy (IJISP), 2009, vol. 3, issue 4, 68-95

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.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://services.igi-global.com/resolvedoi/resolve. ... 4018/jisp.2009100105 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:igg:jisp00:v:3:y:2009:i:4:p:68-95

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Information Security and Privacy (IJISP) is currently edited by Yassine Maleh

More articles in International Journal of Information Security and Privacy (IJISP) from IGI Global
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journal Editor ().