Privacy policies and national culture on the internet
The Web today enables consumers and vendors to conduct business almost without regard to physical location. However, this does not mean that all barriers are removed; culturally-based assumptions about the behavior of the other party can lead to major misunderstandings. We study the differences in privacy-sensitive decisions made by website operators (which can be expected to vary between cultures) as one particular example of these differing assumptions. In particular, we seek to understand whether new norms of behavior may be emerging as online vendors recognize the damage privacy invasions do to consumers trust. We present a large-scale empirical study of privacy-sensitive actions across cultures on the Internet. Our study is based on an automated analysis of P3P documents posted on the 100,000 most popular websites. We find that the adoption of P3P, as well as specific company policies, vary across cultural dimensions. The analysis also suggests that discrepancies exist between concerns for information privacy and the adoption of privacy enhancing technologies within a culture.
p3p cultural dimensions privacy enhancing technologies privacy on the web cultural analysis electronic commerce