Research On Privacy Conflict And Coordination Mechanism In E-commerce

With the rapid development of e-commerce,more and more companies market their products and services by e-commerce,and more and more consumers buy products or services they needed through e-commerce.E-commerce plays an increasingly important role in the people's production and life.At the same time,violations of privacy in e-commerce occur frequently,the privacy issue has aroused consumers' widespread concern.Privacy conflict between consumers and online merchants has become an important factors hindering development of e-commerce.In order to reduce consumer's privacy concern,minimize privacy conflict and promote consumers to provide more personal information,many online merchants have posted privacy policies which will explain how the merchants to collect,use,store and diffuse the visitors' personal information on their site.These information contents could reflect the attitude,value and behavior of online merchants as"information maker",also influence the attitude,value and behavior of the consumers as "information receiver".However,there is currently neither in-depth research on privacy policies for e-commerce sites,nor coordination mechanism analysis of privacy conflict in e-commerce.In this context,the article analyzes the formation cause and coordination mechanism of privacy conflict in e-commerce based on the extant research.Specifically,this article introduces the relevant research at home and abroad,related concepts,research problems,research approaches and framework;briefly summarizes the basic theory which this research involves,including theory of consumer behavior,game theory,the privacy calculus theory and social exchange theory;then studies the privacy policy of B2C online merchants using content analysis,explores the factors influencing consumers' privacy concern and willingness to provide personal information by structural equation mode,and examines privacy concern of consumers through the questionnaire survey method.In this way,we make a comparison between online privacy policy and consumers' privacy concern,and analyze the coordination mechanism of privacy conflict in e-commerce with a combination of factors influencing consumers'privacy concern and willingness to provide personal information.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)The content analysis of privacy policy of e-commerce website.The current situations of China's e-commerce site's privacy policies are as follows:all online merchants have privacy policies,but these privacy policies have very different lengths,poor visibility and readability;and the most frequent contents in privacy policy are"online merchants may disclose your personal information in a particular case",followed by "unauthorized disclosure of personal information","gathering information purposes","type of gathering information","using a variety of measures to ensure the integrity and security of personal information","sharing personal information with third-party cooperation","providing solutions in the presence of consumer objection to online merchant's providing personal information".More than 50%of the privacy policies contain the above sub-categories.Overall there are no significant differences among the various sites,and the differences mainly lie between the group-buying e-commerce sites and vertical e-commerce sites.(2)Factors influencing consumer privacy concern and willingness to provide personal information.This study found that the perception risk of providing personal information,privacy violation experience,perceived usefulness of privacy policy and subjective norms significantly influence consumers' privacy concern,and don't significantly influence the willingness to provide personal information;the perceived interest of providing personal information have no significant effect on privacy concerns,but a significant effect on the willingness to provide personal information;and there is no significant relationship between privacy concerns and willingness to provide personal information.(3)Coordination mechanisms of privacy conflict.The formation causes of privacy conflict in e-commerce are as follows:firstly,consumers don't read the privacy policy and don't understand business practices;meanwhile,privacy policy of online merchants is inconsistent with consumer expectations;usually,online merchants use consumer information,while consumers knowing nothing at all through the privacy policy;consumers only account the interests and at the same time they forget the risks and maintain a high degree of privacy concerns while providing personal information.The last point is consumers pay attention to privacy concerns so closely that they ignore the reality of the situation.For antecedents of privacy conflict,according to the results of the previous study,privacy conflicts can be coordinated from the following three aspects.The first coordinated strategy is based on the information transmission,which includes improved privacy policy visibility and readability,participating in privacy certification of industry self-regulatory organization and showing them;the second coordinated strategy is based on moral hazard,including strengthening legislation regulating the behavior of the online merchants,prompting multi-regulations to let online merchants tell the truth and do as what they says,online merchants designing appropriate incentives,lowering consumer privacy concerns;the third coordinated strategy is based on the inconsistency between the privacy policy and consumer expectations,which includes online merchants adjusting the level of privacy protection based on their level of development,implementing different privacy policy according to consumers different preferences,and implementing a negotiated privacy policy.