Are Privacy Issues Important in Mexican Online Markets? An Empirical Investigation into Published Online Privacy Statements of Mexican Web Sites

Electronic commerce has had a considerable development in the world; it always implies information exchange,-being it frequently personal information-, between Internet users and site owners. Providing such data to a website, when usually users don’t even know where the company is located, has brought concerns about the use of private information by online business. Some countries have started to pass laws and guidelines regarding the use of private information gathered online, and also non government associations have started to certificate websites in the use and management of personal data. This study explores and analyzes the content of 120 privacy statements from online companies established in Mexico to address all privacy dimensions that seems to be important in online environment and to evaluate characteristics and differences in the use of the personal identifiable information among them. When possible, a comparison is made between some of the results of this research for companies operating in Mexico, and the findings made by Pollach (2006) for companies operating in U.S.A. Finally some possible future work is described and some conclusions are made. 1