Clearly it is possible and inevitable that the supplier will save this information and build up customer profiles for future use. It is also possible that this information is passed to third parties such as credit agencies, tax agencies and marketing companies. The cookie is an example of an information collecting agent used in electronic commerce by host web sites to record information about their visitors. This agent is highly intrusive and mostly used surreptitiously. To address consumer concerns, it has been suggested that web pages should contain warnings that cookies are in use, that consumers should be able to suppress cookies and that consumer consent, whether implicit or explicit, should be obtained prior to cookies being invoked.
Traditional trading relies heavily upon non verbal communication.
In electronic commerce the impact of physical characteristics of those communicating has been minimised in all activities. This is potentially beneficial as removing the visual cues about gender, age, ethnicity and social status allows different lines of communication to open up that might have been avoided in the physical world and this might lead to fairer and more open trading. However, the removal of non verbal communication means that trading is different. Trading is now solely dependent on the electronic word which is susceptible to distortion and misunderstanding particularly if trader and consumer are from different countries or cultures. This may well increase the risk of more vulnerable members of society being duped.