A Review of Information Privacy and Its Importance to Consumers and Organizations

Abstract

Abstract The privacy of personal information is an important area of focus in today's electronic world, where information can so easily be captured, stored, and shared. In recent years it has regularly featured as a topic in news media and has become the target of legislation around the world. Multidisciplinary privacy research has been conducted for decades, yet privacy remains a complex subject that still provides fertile ground for further investigation. This article provides a narrative overview of the nature of information privacy, describing the complexities and challenges that consumers and organizations face when making decisions about it, in order to demonstrate its importance to both groups. Based on this work, we present a transdisciplinary view of information privacy research linking the consumer and organization. It illustrates areas of concern for consumers and organizations together with the factors that influence the decisions they make about information privacy. By providing such a view we hope to encourage further cross-disciplinary research into this highly pertinent area. Keywords: privacy, information privacy, personal information, privacy management, consumers, clients, transdisciplinary, organizations, literature review Introduction Whereas we once relied on memories and paper to capture small details, these days information is stored permanently in computer systems. Banking, loyalty and other cards, the Internet, and digital devices such as smart phones and tablets are a few of the many means used to track where we are, what we do, what we like, and a myriad of other minutia and personal information. All these details can be used to compile what Solove (2004) refers to as a "digital dossier" on each of us. In our society we simultaneously seek privacy while having to disclose personal information in order to receive services and establish friendships. Online communication and the Social Web have led us into the habit of sharing large amounts of information with a great number of people, yet many do not feel threatened when doing so (Trepte & Reinecke, 2011). The problem is that the same technology that makes it easy to share personal details has also led to what Moor (1997) refers to as greased information--data that moves like lightening and is difficult to hold on to. Moor (1997, p. 28) states that "once information is captured electronically for whatever purpose, it is greased and ready to go for any purpose". As a consequence, the safety of our personal information has become of great importance and a major topic of interest to the business and IT sectors, as well as the general public. Reports focused on the issues of privacy and personal information have become more numerous and prominent in popular media: * In June 2013, The Guardian published a story on how the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers on a daily basis (Greenwald, 2013). The information came from a document leaked by an NSA contract employee, the now infamous Edward Snowden. * In September 2014, several public celebrities had their personal photographs stolen from Apple's iCloud service (Satariano & Strohm, 2014). In November 2014, Sony Pictures was hacked and thousands of confidential documents containing the personal and private information of employees and celebrities were stolen and posted online (Brandom, 2014; McCormick, 2014). * RadioShack, an iconic US electronics retail chain, filed for bankruptcy in February 2015. The data it collected on over 100 million customers was sold via auction. This sale is being contested by several parties, one claiming that the data does not belong to RadioShack, several others claiming that the company is violating its own privacy policies (Brustein, 2015). * Early in July 2015 it was disclosed that breaches of databases managed by the US government's Office of Personnel Management had exposed the sensitive information of at least 22. …