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Article:
Privacy: Reduce your Customers' Concerns by Building Trust First by: Anti Spam League Before making a purchase from you, buyers need to trust your company and think that your products and services will do what they are supposed to. Do your marketing and online practices help establish the trust necessary to convince prospects to buy from you? What is the connection between privacy and trust? Evidence shows that the two are closely correlated. Since the beginning of interpersonal communication, trust has been perhaps the most important influence on information disclosure. Then, when commerce started, people would trade with those individuals whom they trusted and would avoid those who were perceived as non-trust-worthy. Intrinsically subjective and hard to define, trust is a function of the amount and type of control one has in a relationship. Social exchange theory advocates that individuals weigh both the costs and rewards in deciding whether to engage in social transactions. Aided by a little common sense we can conclude that if the rewards outweigh the costs, then the individual is likely to enter into an exchange relationship whereas if the cost outweighs the rewards there will be no exchange. This trade-off occurring inside people's minds should not be overlooked since it ultimately determines whether they will buy from you or not. The same process takes place in cyberspace. That is, the risks of disclosing personal information are weighed against the benefits when deciding to provide information to a website. Hence, trust is critical to disclosure in both interpersonal and online relationships. This is where privacy concerns come in. In a previous article; 'How to write a privacy policy', we said that privacy involves protecting our integrity as individuals and our right to disclose or not to disclose our personal information to third parties. Since technology has become such a powerful enabler of data collection and utilization, one of the biggest IT responsibilities is making sure that the personal information their systems collect is protected from misuse and abuse. Who draws the line that separates them both? This seems to be quite an intricate issue. As a consequence of the terrorist attacks of September 11 '2001
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