Neither law nor self regulation is sufficient in itself. We need a clever balance, a suite of responses. Let us remember that e-commerce is a fledgling, immature marketplace. We cannot rely solely on existing sophisticated approaches like self regulation. We need some scaffolding to support emerging structures.
Governments have an important role to play here.
Loyalty, trust and fear are not rational or logical, they re people s feelings. Recognising people's feelings about privacy is central to on line trust. Clearly, business needs flexibility to encourage e-commerce. But if it s at the cost of having user s online activities under covert surveillance, with information used without their knowledge or consent, then it is unacceptable. The OECD Guidelines are a very good start, but we now need to implement them and build on them.