Consumer Privacy, On-Line Business and the Internet: Looking for Privacy in all the Wrong Places

Consumer choice and power is enhanced by the Internet but simultaneously consumer privacy is threatened. Privacy can be protected or ‘regulated’ online, as Lessig theorises, by the market, norms, law or ‘code’. This article argues that although none of the first three modes of protection are satisfactory, this does not mean ‘code’ solutions such as P3P should be embraced uncritically. The true answer may be that consumers are simply prepared to sacrifice privacy on-line to embrace the correlative advantages but this choice is uninformed and does not prevent fears about privacy impacting on consumer confidence in e-commerce. A new effort must be made not to abandon law as unenforceable in dealing with problems such as spam and privacy, but to explore how it can be amended and globally harmonised to provide sanction and backing to self regulatory and technical solutions.