| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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as a topic, we have little knowledge of how people conceive of privacy in their daily lives, and what their perceptions and resulting reactions are to the collection and use of personal information.
The issues regarding privacy and control of information become even more significant considering that technology has greatly reduced the transaction cost of sharing information (Jarvenpaa and Staples, 2001) and virtually all large organizations have some type of data warehouse to collect and analyze data on their customers. The consumer-information industry grew an estimated 51% annually from 1996 to 2002 as companies tried to gather more information on both existing and potential customers (Watson et al., 2002). Currently the online database industry has sales of over $6.5 billion a year for information products (West, 2000).
Cazier et al. (2003a) found that a customer’s level of trust in an organization had a strong impact on their willingness to disclose personal information, especially sensitive items including contact information or other information that might reveal the identification of the consumer. This would include information like email address, phone number, full name, etc. – precisely the type of information the online business would like to have from visitors to their site.
Trust has a profound impact on e-commerce and information disclosure. By raising our awareness of the factors that build consumer trust, we can learn to alleviate some of the concerns that consumers have when doing business online. Currently, we lack a full understanding of trust and how to create and maintain it in the virtual marketplace. This study examines the concept of value congruence or shared values in the production of trust. Value congruence has been shown to build trust in e-commerce systems (Cazier et al., 2002, Cazier et al., 2003a, Cazier et al., 2003b, Cazier et al., 2003c, Cazier and Gill, 2003) and can be an important piece in building (or destroying) trust with existing and potential customers. This study makes an important contribution to the literature by analyzing the impact of value congruence on trust, trust