Value Focused Assessment of Individual Privacy Concerns for Internet Commerce.

This paper presents preliminary findings from an empirical study to assess individual privacy concerns for Internet commerce. Using Keeney’s (1999) value-focused thinking approach, 92 individuals with prior Internet shopping experience were interviewed from across the United States and the United Kingdom. Data from the interviews was used to identify eight fundamental and 20 means objectives that are essential for protecting individual privacy in the context of Internet commerce. The findings help in developing a framework to ensure privacy of individuals and provide a basis for an instrument to measure privacy concerns when shopping online. 1 VALUE-FOCUSED ASSESSMENT OF PRIVACY CONCERNS Assessing the value of individual privacy for Internet commerce has been a concern of many researchers. Some have considered process fairness as an adequate means for ensuring individual privacy (e.g., Milne and Gordon 1993). Others have considered constraining unauthorized secondary use as a useful mechanism for protecting privacy. More recently, many researchers have