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form which contains personal information that defines or represents his/her habits.
This information is collected and can be passed to other marketing companies to
market their product and services without their knowledge. Many believe that too
much personal information is being collected when they go online (Caudill, 2000).
Others are not willing to use credit card numbers to purchase items on the Internet.
The strange contradiction is that people like to use the Internet for cyber shopping
while at the same time they do not trust it. Millions of people are using the Internet
everyday, for work, play, learning, business and for social interaction. As we
depend on and enjoy it more, we are worried if and how others or organizations may
be secretly watching us and collecting information for purposes that we are
unaware. “Spamming,” which is the practice of sending out unsolicited e-mail, is
growing because it costs so little to send out millions of messages or advertisements
electronically. Many prominent high-technology companies have already been
caught attempting to quietly collect information about their customers via the
Internet. DoubleClick, a popular supplier of online advertising services, and
RealNetworks, the producer of the RealPlayer line of multimedia software, were
subjects of a scandal when their millions of trusted users learned that their personal
information was being collected without their consent (Kling, 1996; Gurak, 1997).
Privacy can be defined as an individual’s right to be left alone, free from interference
or surveillance from other parties. Privacy requires security mechanism, policy and
technology to provide control over information.
The way sites handle personal information is a concern to the general public.
The general population is very cold to the idea of having personal information
distributed without the knowledge of the individuals in question. It is an issue
because of the risk
of taking adverse actions based on inaccurate information, i.e.,
spam, phone call (Gillin, 2000a ). Internet privacy is clearly controversial and can
be confusing. As mentioned above there are companies who are keeping track of
the Net users. Most of the time they do that with the help of a unique identifier called
a cookie, usually a string of random-looking letters, that a Web server places on a
computer’s hard drive. Cookies enable Web sites to track usage patterns and
deliver customized content to visitors.