Online Shoppers are Willing to Pay More for Privacy

Caroline Matische writes "People are willing to pay more to buy items from online retailers who make their privacy policies clear, a new Carnegie Mellon University study showed. People were more likely to buy from online merchants with good privacy policies and were also willing to pay about 60 cents extra on a $15 purchase when buying from a site with a privacy policy they liked."

Comments

Privacy is not always temporary

[feepcreature]

It varies, depending on to whom you give your information.

In most of Europe, companies are bound by laws implementing the EU's Data Protection Directive, which makes it clear that your data is not just another asset of the company which collects it, and that companies can only process it for the purposes for which you gave them the data.

In the US, companies howl with outrage at the prospect that they should treat their customers with similar fairness. You could argue that resisting even the smallest extra expense is in the short term interests of their shareholders. Of course that ignore the possibility that ethical policies may increase customer loyalty, and better serve their shareholders' longer term interests - as well as being "The Right Thing".

There is a lot of nonsense spoken about "impersonal corporations". Folk forget that it's actual human beings who make the "decisions of the corporation". Some of those people do good and some do evil.

Maybe they should be held to account?