Privacy is important to both businesses, consumers and individuals. The issue of privacy
today revolve mainly around consumers in the Internet age. Privacy is a controversial term
especially within e-Commerce because not everyone has the same perception on what is
considered private or not. According to a dictionary meaning, privacy is the state of being
free from unwanted or undue intrusion or disturbance in one’s private life or affairs;
freedom to be let alone. The privacy of individuals can be violated in different ways. There
have been many court battles over privacy issues which use the Constitution as
reinforcement for backing up the value of privacy. Privacy is sacred. No matter how a
person chooses live their life, at some point there is some information that they want to
keep from the rest of the world. One of the main ways in which people’s privacy is
violated is through the means of e-commerce. E-commerce is a kind of commerce in which
sellers and buyers process transactions over the Internet. For the sake of a secure
transaction, unlike regular in person transaction, online transactions require sensitive
information from their customers. Sensitive information such as names, addresses, credit
card numbers, phone numbers and e-mail addresses are collected and stored in the seller’s
database. This information can be sold or hacked by a third party or reused for different
purpose. Because of the many security issues that arise from e-Commerce that concern
around privacy, online businesses should not save any customer information unless they
have consent from their customer.
There are different ethical concerns that comes with information gathered by commercial
companies especially through a third party medium such as the Internet. One of the main
ethical concerns regarding the gathering of personal information by commercial companies
is safety. Safety is a very important thing in a human’s life. People want to be safe
wherever they go. Nobody wants their safety to be disturbed in anyway. People’s safety
can be disrupted by bad people who want to use this private information to benefit
themselves. The first thing these criminals do to disrupt an individual’s safety is by first
gathering information about the individual they want to hurt. One way to get these
information’s is through an online source. Nowadays people can get any information once
it is out there over the Internet. Therefore, the main ethical question to be answered here is
how online businesses should handle their customer’s information. Let’s first look at how
