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Securing Our Private Information Online

By IGI Global on Apr 25, 2011

When we use the internet, we often provide multinational companies with our personally identifiable information (PII). Sometimes the transfer of this information is not even apparent to us. Consumers, therefore, rely on these these companies to use their information in an ethical manner and not sell it to other businesses without permission. "Transborder data flows makes it difficult to deal with information privacy problems as the majority of the existing privacy laws do not address this issue," write three scholars in an article recently published in the latest issue of IGI Global's International Journal of Information Security and Privacy (IJISP).

The transfer of private information has therefore "become one of the most critical issues of international concern that threatens the growth of global e-commerce," they write in their IJISP article.

The three Texas State University–San Marcos scholars surveyed 177 and corporate managers and technical professionals who had subscribed to World Trade magazine. They discovered a positive attitude toward consumer privacy: the survey participants, in general, strongly agreed that companies should not use personal information for any purpose but the one under which the information was provided and should never sell these records of personally identifiable information to other companies.

"This result indicated that business managers and CEOs have respect for customers' and employees' information privacy," write Texas State University–San Marcos researchers Garry L. White, Francis A. Méndez Mediavilla, and Jaymeen R. Shah. They continue, "These corporate decision makers probably believe that individuals own their personal information, which should be used only for the purpose for which it was collected. Further, personal information should not be sold or shared with business partners without prior authorization from individuals owning the [personally identifiable information]."

"In this study, CEOs constituted 45% of all the respondents, while only 12% of the respondents were technical professionals," write these American scholars. "Further, almost 60% of the respondents represented multinational companies that did business outside the USA."

While the survey respondents overall agreed that the unauthorized transfer of consumers' personal information was unethical, White et al. found that the CEOs surveyed supported this concept the least adamantly. The survey results suggest that "managers and technical personnel, who deal more directly with individuals' personal information, have a stronger view against the secondary use of personal information than CEOs, who are more focused on company's bottom line," they write.

"This could imply that CEOs may allow or even push manag¬ers to make secondary use of personal informa¬tion if such use of customers' PII is beneficial to company's bottomline, competitiveness, and/or supports operationalization of corporate strate¬gies," assert White et al. "Typically, increase in competitive pressure may compel companies to collect more PII, and use it for secondary purpose, such as analyzing collected PII to understand consumers' online behavior (Dhillon & Moores, 2001)." 45% of the 177 survey respondents were CEOs.

White et al. suggest that creating "a unified set of information privacy regulations across countries involved in global trade" would be a "logical [policy] move" because it would simplify it would provide legislative consistency across borders and "simplify development and implementation of global corporate information privacy policies."

The U.S. House and Senate recently introduced two bills to provide for a "privacy ‘bill of rights,'" reported Information Today on April 21. You can view the legislative information for both bills at the linked PDFs or access legislative data, such as committee actions, by visiting Thomas.Loc.Gov and searching for HR1528 (pdf) or SB799 (pdf).

"Irrespective of whether unified global information privacy policies are developed or not, it is imperative for companies to carefully address information privacy concerns, and focus on developing and implementing appropriate information privacy policies that control how PII is collected, processed, used, shared and transferred across national boundaries," assert White et al.

To purchase a copy of this article, please visit the following link: www.igi-global.com/bookstore/article.aspx?titleid=53015. You can view a sample copy of IJISP's first issue on our website.

The mission of the International Journal of Information Security and Privacy (IJISP) is to "create and foster a forum where research in the theory and practice of information security and privacy is advanced." To learn more about the International Journal of Information Security and Privacy (IJISP), please visit: www.igi-global.com/ijisp.

To recommend this journal to your university library, please click on the following link: https://www.igi-global.com/forms/refertolibrarian.aspx?titleid=1096

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