Privacy Statements as a Means of Uncertainty Reduction in WWW Interactions - End User Computing Challenges and Technologies: Emerging Tools and Applications - page 191

people want more control over their personally
identifying information. Similarly, Graeff and
Harmon (2002) report that consumers who make
purchases over the Internet are less concerned
about information privacy than those who do
not, but both groups have the desire to be better
informed about data handling practices.
Olivero and Lunt (2004) found that users'
risk awareness raises the demand for control
and rewards. Because of their lack of control,
consumers tend to provide false information,
disable cookies, or abort transactions altogether
when they are required to enter personal data
(Eirinaki & Vazirgiannis, 2003; Milne & Boza,
1999). Hagel and Rayport (1997) hold that this
unwillingness to divulge personally identifying
information stems from people's perceptions that
companies make use of the data they obtain but
do not provide users with benefits in return. Such
benefits may include better customer relationship
management or refined products and services
(Danna & Gandy, 2002). However, users have
been found to be willing to make trade-offs and
exchange personal information for benefits that are
clearly visible. Monetary rewards, in particular,
have been found to raise users' willingness to
divulge personally identifiable information (Teo
et al., 2004). This runs counter to the findings of
Andrade et al. (2002), who report that solid cor-
porate reputations and complete privacy policies
decrease people's concerns about data privacy,
whereas offering a reward in exchange for data
intensifies people's concerns.

privacy practices was 14% in 1998 (Federal Trade
Commission, 1998), 66% in 1999 (Culnan, 1999),
and 88% in 2000 (Federal Trade Commission,
2000), indicating that companies seem to prefer
self-regulation to legislation and have begun to
disclose their privacy policies voluntarily before
they were required to do so by law.
Privacy policies are capable of increasing user
knowledge about data collection and dispelling
users' fears about privacy infringements by de-
tailing how data are collected and for what they
are used. A problem inherent in privacy policies,
however, is the paradox situation that data may
have already been collected before users are able
to access the privacy policy and learn when data
are collected. Anther shortcoming of privacy poli-
cies is that users have no means to check whether
companies fulfill the privacy commitments they
make in their policies (Presler-Marshall, 2000).
The dynamic nature of the WWW makes it par-
ticularly difficult for companies to comply with
their own privacy policies. Every time a company
adds new features, it risks invading users' privacy
or violating its own privacy policy. Similar prob-
lems arise when companies have co-branded Web
sites or when content and images are delivered by
third parties, who collect data governed by their
own privacy policies (Lynch, 2004).
Previous studies on privacy policies have ex-
amined the extent to which they address the U.S.
Federal Trade Commission's privacy dimensions
(Liu & Arnett, 2002; O'Connor, 2003; Ryker et
al., 2002), the presence or absence of information
on data collection and data sharing (Miyazaki &
Fernandez, 2000), the evolution of online privacy
disclosures posted by U.S. companies (Milne &
Culnan, 2002), and cultural differences among
privacy policies posted by companies in different
countries (Johnson-Page & Thatcher, 2001).
Milne and Culnan's (2004) survey of when
and why consumers read privacy policies reveals
that Internet users read privacy policies to man-
age risk but are more likely to read them if they
perceive them as comprehensible. In this case,

privacy policies

In the past few years, privacy policies on com-
mercial Web sites have become de rigueur . In
1997, comprehensive privacy policies were still the
exception rather than the rule, even among large
corporations (Messmer, 1997). Two U.S. Federal
Trade Commission Surveys and the Georgetown
Internet Privacy Policy Survey have revealed
that the percentage of Web sites disclosing their