The Protection of Consumer Privacy in E-Business

Electronic business, commonly known as "eBusiness" or "e-business" ,is a business running on the Internet. Beside buying and selling, it also serves a much wider consumer base and collaborates with business partners. The term also has an accurate definition -"interaction with business partners, where the interaction is enabled by information technology". When information technology has become more accessible, much cheaper and more powerful, E-business has become a new trend. Because of low running cost, E-business lowers transaction costs and has hundreds of millions of participants already. The world is now full of people who are much more familiar with advanced technology than twenty years ago. E-business, therefore, is understandable to have the competitive advantage of new technologies in today’s market and becomes a necessary sector of our lives.

When e-business is convenient and gaining in popularity, it produces significant issue- safety protection of consumer privacy. People may sometimes need to provide personal information to company when they have transactions with others, for example, shopping on Internet and doing bank service on Internet. As a result, it is easy to expose their personal privacy to public. In view of this, it has stirred up much controversy on the ways to protect consumer privacy in e-business.

There are several causes of the need of protecting consumer privacy on e-business. First, the increasing number of hackers results in unhealthy Internet environment. It is also the most significant cause of the issue. The hackers act illegally and steal information on Internet when there are loopholes. According to (Clifford R.D. 2006), a hacker is to "gain unauthorized access to a computer in order to commit another crime such as stealing information contained in that system". Worst still, illegal people will probably harm these consumers.

Second, people provide their personal information when they do online shopping or banking