This post aims to highlight the importance of privacy and the efforts to prevent the infringement of data privacy in the platform-based businesses. The concept of privacy is generally defined as “an individual’s ability to control the extent by which the personal information is acquired and used” (Galanxhi-Janaqi and Fui-Hoon Nah, 2004). Platform-based businesses are inseparable from the internet since their operations more than often do not require any hardware. Then, when the internet is involved, data privacy affects aspects such as the obtaining, distribution or the non-authorized use of personal information.
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Today, information technologies’ growing size in information processing, and its complex nature, have made privacy an important issue. Consequently, distrusts of consumers are also increasing because of the same reason the platform-based information technologies are successful. Due to the sensitive nature of the topic and the increased importance, privacy infringement is that much more harmful to the companies’ performance. Awareness for the privacy heightened more than ever, privacy related hazards and crises can be extremely devastating.
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Therefore, a company’s damage control capacity regarding the privacy related dangers is of utmost importance. Prevention and promotion are both equally important in data privacy. One of the many ways to secure both is by maintaining a regulatory focus under difficult situations. In privacy research, such regulatory focus is widely studied in order to analyze human motivation and behavior. Based on such approach, in the work of Chang and colleagues (2018), it was attempted to provide deeper understanding of the role of privacy policy on consumers’ perceived privacy.
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Privacy policy play an important role for consumers to build trust and reduce privacy related concerns. Due to the introduction of GDPR, implementation of privacy policy is not voluntary. Such prevalence of the privacy policies also expose consumers to repeated evaluations of such policies. This eventually conditions them into acquiring personal standards on how well a company’s privacy practices are followed and the responsiveness of the practices.
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One of the other common criteria in evaluating the perceived effectiveness of privacy policy is notice (Wu and Huang, 2012). Along with the freedom to choose the extent of the shared data, notifying the users with the details in the executions of policy is important (Wu and Huang, 2012). Based on these, the responsiveness and the level of clarity in the communications promoting the privacy policy are employed as the tool of measuring the perceived quality of the policy.
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– Galanxhi-Janaqi, H. and Fui-Hoon Nah, F. (2004), “U-commerce: emerging trends and
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– Chang, Y., Wong, SF, Libaque-Saenz, CF, & Lee, H. (2018). The role of privacy policy
on consumers’ perceived privacy. Government Information Quarterly , 35 (3), 445-459.
– Wu, K. Huang, S.Y. (2012) The effect of online privacy policy on consumer privacy
concern and trust
