Privacy Issues in the Era of Ubiquitous Commerce

The vision of ubiquitous commerce (u‐commerce) is realized through the convergence of electronic, mobile, television, voice and silent commerce applications. The ubiquity, universality, uniqueness and unison of u‐commerce will provide two principal benefits for individual users and businesses: increased convenience as well as more personalized and customized services. However, u‐commerce will also bring emerging issues such as a greater degree of privacy concerns that will impact individual users, companies and society at large. This paper proposes and elaborates on a conceptual framework for privacy in the u‐commerce era. This framework is developed based on Lessig's macro‐level perspective and Adams' micro‐level perspective. Using this framework, privacy issues related to u‐commerce are discussed and future research directions are presented.