Privacy Issues in the Era of Ubiquitous Commerce

The vision of ubiquitous commerce (u-commerce) is realized through the convergence of electronic, mobile, television, voice and silent commerce applications. The ubiquity, universality, uniqueness, and unison of u-commerce will provide two principal benefits for individual users and companies: increased convenience as well as more personalized and customized services. However, u-commerce will also bring new issues such as a greater degree of privacy concerns that will impact individual users, companies, and the society at large. This paper proposes and elaborates on a conceptual framework for privacy in the u-commerce era. It combines Lessig’s macro-level perspective – the four-factor model of privacy – with Adam’s micro-level perspective – the perceived privacy factors model. Using this framework, privacy issues related to ucommerce are discussed and future research directions are presented