Information Privacy Concerns and E-Commerce: An Empirical Investigation

E-business industry and consumers are struggling to find a balance between consumers' privacy and the promotion of the development of online business. Regulation has widely been considered as an appropriate way to resolve regulatory conflicts in e-commerce. A multitude of surveys have investigated privacy attitudes, revealing a general desire among Internet users to protect their privacy. This paper concentrates on the tension between e-commerce, privacy concerns, and user behavior in Austria with a special focus on the detection of demographic attributes that influence users' perception of privacy issues. The authors present both a conceptual framework and empirical findings pertaining to privacy awareness and user behavior. Our results show that the willingness to provide personal data over the Internet to a certain extent depends on (socio-) demographic characteristics such as gender, knowledge, and experience.