Information Privacy

The Internet has been pervasive in our way of life and poses consumers of Internet services an implicit trade-off: By revealing true information, they may obtain customized product offerings and useful information/services; However, by doing so, they run the risk that the information would be misused. The potential cost and benefits of information disclosure may dictate consumer online behaviour and is of significant importance to the growth of Internet commerce.

Existing privacy research focuses primarily on the motivation and process behind consumers' disclosure of personal information and the role of regulatory bodies in information privacy protection. For the first stream of work, we look at the various factors which benefits the consumers, the tradeoffs they make with regards to contextual characteristics in a bid to formulate a general theory of online privacy that could explain consumers' reactions to websites' information request. In the second stream of work, we address the continued debate on whether regulatory bodies should enforce protections on online information privacy