Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in the US armed a
number of shoppers with the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P)
tool, which alerts them to the privacy practices of sites they
visit.
They found that shoppers were prepared to pay 30p more on goods
worth £7 at sites that guaranteed they would not abuse their
private details.
"Most Americans believe that their right to privacy is under
serious threat and express concern about companies collecting their
personal data," said the report, which was called 'The Effect of
Online Privacy Information on Purchasing Behavior: An Experimental
Study'.
"While most people claim to be very concerned about their
privacy, they do not consistently take actions to protect it," said
the study. "Our research shows that providing accessible privacy
information reduces the information asymmetry gap between merchants
and consumers. This reduction tends to lead consumers to purchase
from online retailers who better protect their privacy."
"Additionally, our study indicates that once privacy information
is made more salient, some consumers are willing to pay a premium
to purchase from more privacy-protective websites," it said.
The study equipped 72 online shoppers with P3P and observed how
it changed their shopping behaviour.
P3P is a system designed by the not-for-profit World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) to allow websites to communicate their privacy
policies to users.
Almost all professional websites will have some kind of privacy
policy outlining what the business will do with the information
about visitors and customers that it collects. Typically, though,
users do not read the documents, which are often dense and littered
with legalese and sometimes hard to find.
P3P was designed to broker automatic communication and
negotiation on privacy between a user and a site. If privacy
policies are written in the correct form a user's browser can
automatically check a site's policies against that user's
pre-defined privacy preferences.
The system then alerts the user in plain English about conflicts
between the site's privacy policies and the user's preferences.
Alternatively, the site simply rejects the website's cookie, the
piece of code which stores information about the user.
Though P3P has been in existence for five years, it is still
only used by around 20% of e-commerce websites.
The Carnegie Mellon study, though, seems to prove that having
P3P could bring custom to a site, which could in turn help its
adoption.
The researchers developed a P3P-enabled search engine, Privacy Finder that annotates
search results with privacy information derived from P3P policies
and generates 'privacy reports' for P3P-enabled sites. Privacy
Finder submits search queries to Google and Yahoo!, obtains the
results, and checks for P3P policies. It then displays the results
annotated with privacy indicators that graphically represent, on a
scale of zero to four, how well a site’s P3P policy matches the
user’s privacy preferences.
"Our experiment shows that once privacy information is made more
visible, people will tend to purchase from merchants that offer
more privacy protection," said the study. "This was true for both
privacy-sensitive and non-privacy-sensitive items."
The researchers said that their next step would be to produce a
more comprehensive study in a more natural 'field' setting.
Last month the European Commission said that it backed the use
of technologies such as P3P, which it calls PETs (privacy enhancing
technologies). It said that it would now embark on a plan to
encourage users and retailers to use them.
"The Commission considers that PETs should be developed and more
widely used, in particular where personal data is processed through
[computer] networks," said a Commission statement. "The Commission
considers that wider use of PETs would improve the protection of
privacy as well as help fulfil data protection rules. The use of
PETs would be complementary to the existing legal framework and
enforcement mechanisms."
The Commission said that it may ask European standards bodies to
decide if Europe needs specific technical standards for PETs. It
also said that it would ask public authorities to promote PETs by
using them themselves.
It also said that it would investigate its own accreditation
badge for sites with good privacy practices, which it would call
'privacy seals'.
"The Commission intends to investigate the feasibility of an
EU-wide system of privacy seals, which would also include an
economic and societal impact analysis," it said. "The purpose of
such privacy seals would be to ensure consumers can easily identify
a certain product as ensuring or enhancing data protection rules in
the processing of data, in particular by incorporating appropriate
PETs."
