Published In

While Internet users claim to be concerned about online privacy, their behavior rarely reflects those concerns. In this paper we investigate whether the availability of com-parison information about the privacy practices of online merchants affects users ’ behavior. We conducted our study using Privacy Finder, a “privacy-enhanced search engine” that displays search results annotated with the privacy pol-icy information of each site. The privacy information is garnered from computer-readable privacy policies found at the respective sites. We asked users to purchase one non-privacy-sensitive item and then one privacy-sensitive item using Privacy Finder, and observed whether the privacy in-formation provided by our search engine impacted users’ purchasing decisions (participants ’ costs were reimbursed