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Journal of Business Ethics (2006) 67:107123 Springer 2006 DOI 10.1007/s10551-006-9007-7
Marketing Dataveillance and Digital Privacy: Using Theories of Justice to Understand Consumers Online Privacy Concerns
Laurence Ashworth Clinton Free
ABSTRACT. Technology used in online marketing has advanced to a state where collection, enhancement and aggregation of information are instantaneous. This proliferation of customer information focused technology brings with it a host of issues surrounding customer privacy. This article makes two key contributions to the debate concerning digital privacy. First, we use theories of justice to help understand the way consumers conceive of, and react to, privacy concerns. Specifically, it is argued that an important component of consumers privacy concerns relates to fairness judgments, which in turn comprise of the two primary components of distributive and procedural justice. Second, we make a number of prescriptions, aimed at both firms and regulators, based on the notion that consumers respond to perceived privacy violations in much the same way they would respond to an unfair exchange.
KEY WORDS: Digital privacy, fairness, online behavioural marketing, theories of justice
Introduction
AT&Ts reputed rst ever You Will Internet banner advertisement in 1994.
Not even the self-assured designers of the rst-ever banner advertisement could have foreseen the way in which rapid advances in information technology over the past two decades have dramatically reduced the cost of gathering and analysing consumer information. Although initial forecasts of business to consumer (B2C) internet trade have proven largely over-inated, the growth in online consumer sales in recent years has been striking. The widespread acceptance of the Internet as a platform for commerce has made it possible for organisations to gather a wide range of consumer information including browsing patterns, items purchased, protability, dates and times of activities and keystroke behaviour. Drawing on the richness of this data, over the past decade online behavioural marketing, which uses browsing behaviour as a predictor of receptiveness to certain ad messages, has burgeoned. Concomitant with this growth has been an escalation in privacy concerns relating to the collection and use of information gathered online (so-called online data-veillance1) (Caudill and Murphy, 2000; Miller and Weckert, 2000).
The marketing industry has long been a cause clbre of privacy advocates. Certainly, tracking consumer spending patterns, movements and preferences are not new marketing phenomena....