Internet security and privacy

The Internet has become a significant issue to the business nowadays as it enable the business to achieve a number of benefits such as reducing lead-time of the process, cost reduction and expanding the market to new customers (Chaffey, 2002; Kalakota and Whinston, 1997). Internet commerce has continued to grow at an explosive rate with 10 percent per month (Forcht and Fore, 1995; Hopwood et al., 2000). However, the threat of the Internet security is one of the significant barriers to the Internet commerce (Hawkins et al., 2000). Aldridge et al. (1997) noted that the top three significant concerns in customers ’ point of view are system privacy, user privacy and security of commerce transaction. According to Larson (1998)’s survey, 70 percent of corporate purchasing decision-makers claimed that because of security concerns they are not currently purchasing over the Internet. As noted by Verity (1995) (quoted in Aldridge et al., 1997), “if customers and merchants do not have a certain degree of confidence, electronic commerce is not going to work”. According to Furnell and Karweni (1999)’s research, of the 47 percent of credit card holding respondents who are online shoppers, 92 percent of them have concerns on security. Statistically, while only around 2 percent o