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devices and services. Still, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau
of Investigation are making amendments to existing laws to take advantage of this
new technology in the future.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
The growing popularity of cyber shopping means information can be beamed
around the globe with just one click. However, it also means that some information
that we believe to be private, such as medical records or financial data, is now in
the public domain for all to see. Each time someone visits a Web site to get
information or make a purchase, the site operator, as well as other third parties, can
surreptitiously collect many types of information about that person. With more
consumers buying books and music online and more new media companies, the
power to track what people read and listen to will be in the hands of a few very large
firms. These firms keep track
of people while leaving a cookie in their system. Most
of the companies have been doing this for years and they have developed intensive
databases of the people surfing the Net. Employers are keeping an eye on their
employees while reading their mail, and check which sites they click during official
working hours. Later on, they may use them to fire a person. Even the Internet
service providers keep track of the sites visited by their customers.
As cyber shopping grows, organizations may attempt to gather new and more
revealing consumer data. Organizations like banks, credit card associations, direct
mail marketers and other organizations started mining personal data for profit long
before the Net burst into prominence. However, public concern about privacy
protection today tends to focus on the Internet or online environments. Since we are
interested in having more interactions with the online environment, maybe we need
to question how much one is prepared to accommodate for the sake of conve-
nience. It will also be worthwhile to research issues through empirical studies to
determine if privacy concerns will have a direct impact on the number of cyber
shopping transactions. Although many studies indicate that cyber shoppers list