The Benefits and Costs Of Online Privacy Legislation

Many people are worried that information about their private life is more accessible and easy to catch on the Internet than offline technology. Especially concerns are annoying e-mails, credit card fraud, theft of personal information, harassment and so on. In this article we will analyze key issues to protect online privacy. It made three important contributions: First, it provides the most comprehensive assessment of the estimated benefits and costs of monitoring online privacy to date. Secondly, it provides the most comprehensive assessment of US legislation and legislation proposals to protect online privacy. Finally, it provides some policy on online privacy regulations and presents an area for future research. To analyze the potential cost and benefit of the current discussion on online privacy and to evaluate the proposed regulation, we are putting concrete recommendations of government involvement to protect forward online privacy. It includes: The government should fund research to evaluate the effectiveness of existing privacy laws before considering new regulations. Governments should generally not create different provisions for privacy concerns based on whether there are problems online or offline. Since most US commercial websites are already doing so, the government should not ask the website to provide notification of its privacy policy. As a name and consumer purchasing habit, the government not only distinguishes how to manage and disseminate highly confidential information such as such specific medical records and social security numbers , There is a need for more general information. Because these benefits may not seem important, the government should not need a company to provide extensive information for consumers accessing personal information gathering purpose of online marketing and cost Will be very high

More laws still have the pressure of public opinion. In the first session of the 107th Congress, more than 50 bills regulating online privacy were introduced. However, resistance to more regulations is emerging. Online privacy alliance (OPA) insisted that the law further weakened the country's competitiveness, weakened the new economy (2001) 0.2 Hearn estimated the cost of compliance with these bills for $ 900 million $ 3.6 billion have become. This leads to our research objectives. What is the cost of posting personal information online? The real problem is not whether consumers place importance on online privacy. It is clear that people value online privacy. What I do not know is how many people are evaluating their privacy online. Despite major controversies and policy concerns, little research has been done on this problem so far.

Regarding information, the online privacy regulation in the United States is still in a neutral state. Industry self discipline, the main way, will not work. Some people ask legislation to solve this problem, but it is not clear whether online privacy is suitable for legislative solutions. At the same time, over time, websites, online advertisers, Internet service providers, etc. collect and store more and more personal information. Nonetheless, the Internet violates the privacy of individuals. If this dynamics does not change, it will hurt the trust of users and threaten the future of the Internet economy itself.