Improvement in information communication technology (ICT) is one of the factors behind growth in economic productivity. A major dimension of this is the use of the Internet in e-commerce, allowing companies to collect, store, and exchange personal information obtained from visitors to their websites. Electronic commerce has many different variants, and is believed by many governments throughout the world to be the engine of economic stability in the future. While electronic commerce has many benefits, there is evidence to suggest privacy concerns are an inhibitor to its adoption in Jordan and the UK. According to Campbell (1997, p.45), privacy in this context can be defined as “the ability of individuals to determine the nature and extent of information about them which is being communicated to others”. The importance of information in e-commerce has increased, because the main success factor for the completion of transactions between businesses and consumers is the companies’ ability to access consumers’ personal details. This conflicts with the consumers’ fear of providing personal information to un-trusted parties, which makes them disinterested in entering contracts via the internet. This research discusses privacy concerns as an inhibitor for electronic commerce by providing a comparison between UK and Jordanian regulations, to establish the impact that these regulations have ameliorating privacy concerns regarding the development of electronic commerce in Jordan and the UK. The interpretive grounded theory approach has allowed the researcher to gain a deep understanding about privacy perceptions of electronic commerce held by the main stakeholders: government, businesses and consumers. Furthermore, through implementing the Straussian grounded theory approach as a data collection and analysis method, two grounded theories have emerged as giving deeper understanding of the situation in Jordan and the UK regarding privacy concerns and how this affects electronic commerce development in both countries.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:571344 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Aljaber, Maher |
| Publisher | De Montfort University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/2086/8236 |
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