Readability of Privacy Policies of Healthcare Websites

Health-related personal information is very privacy-sensitive. Online privacy policies inform Website users about the ways their personal information is gathered, processed and stored. In the light of increasing privacy concerns, privacy policies seem to be an important mechanism for increasing customer loyalty. However, in practice, consumers only rarely read privacy policies, possibly due to the common assumption that policies are hard to read. By designing and implementing an automated extraction and readability analysis toolset, we present the first study that provides empirical evidence on readability of over 5,000 privacy policies of health websites and over 1,000 privacy policies of top e-commerce sites. Our results confirm the difficulty of reading current privacy policies. We further show that health websites\u27 policies are more readable than top e-commerce ones, but policies of non-commercial health websites are worse readable than commercial ones. Our study also provides a solid policy text corpus for further research

Globalization and E-Commerce VII: Environment and Policy in the U.S.

The United States is a global leader in both Business-to-Customer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) electronic commerce. This leadership comes in part from the historical US strengths in information technology, telecommunications, financial services, and transportation - all of which are essential enabling components of e-commerce. The size and strength of the US economy, the wealth of its consumer base, and the relatively open access to venture capital creates an attractive environment for e-commerce investment. Official US Government policy toward e-commerce is to let the private sector take the lead, with government helping to make the business climate right for innovation and investment. Prior US Government investments in essential e-commerce infrastructure for military purposes (e.g., digital computing, the Internet) and for civilian purposes (e.g., interstate highways, air transport) played an important role in the US lead in e-commerce. US Government policies favoring widespread economic liberalization since the 1970\u27s in areas such as financial services, transportation, and telecommunications helped enable and stimulate private sector investment and innovation in e-commerce. The collapse of the dot.com era in the late 1990\u27s hit key sectors of e-commerce hard, suggesting that some of the more dramatic and positive predictions of e-commerce growth and impact will either be delayed substantially or will not come to pass. The strength of surviving e-commerce companies (e.g., Amazon and eBay), as well as the relative stability of the technology sector (e.g., Cisco Systems, Dell, Intel, IBM) and the continued investment of large industry sectors (e.g., autos, finance) suggest that e-commerce is still growing and is here to stay. Consumers are intrigued by B2C e-commerce, and many have used such services, but serious concerns related to privacy and transaction security remain obstacles to universal adoption of B2C e-commerce

Marketing, Consumers and Technology: Perspectives for Enhancing Ethical Transactions

The advance of technology has influenced marketing in a number of ways that have ethical implications. Growth in use of the Internet and e-commerce has placed electronic cookies, spyware, spam, RFIDs, and data mining at the forefront of the ethical debate. Some marketers have minimized the significance of these trends. This overview paper examines these issues and introduces the two articles that follow. It is hoped that these entries will further the important marketing and technology ethical debate