Understanding the role of equity in leveraging privacy concerns of consumers in ecommerce

Since ecommerce requires individuals to disclose their personal information, an issue of information privacy becomes an impediment towards its adoption. However, a paradox exists whereby individuals claim privacy concerns, yet act contrarily by using ecommerce. Our research aims to investigate the reasoning behind individuals use of ecommerce, despite claiming concerns for their information privacy. Based on previous findings, we argue that consumers undergo a calculation of equal benefits in conducting business with online firms, where they agree to firms utilizing their personal information as long as they retain control over its usage. This paper is a research-in-progress, and as such, our future work would be to validate our argument by collecting and empirically analyzing individuals responses with regards to ecommerce use. We expect that our paper would contribute by better understanding the conditions in which individuals disclose or withhold personal information.