The Significance of Consumer Privacy in Internet Marketing

Author: stellarichard0 | Posted: 29.02.2012

The World Wide Web opens doors to unlimited opportunities for sellers as well as buyers. Not only does it make available a range of products and service providers to interested consumers, but it allows these consumers to make well informed decisions based on multiple resources that are available in form of websites that offer customer reviews, price comparisons and competitive product and service ranges.

Enabling Buyer and Seller Engagements

Internet marketing initiatives allow brands and businesses towards drawing these customers to their pages and facilitating the meeting of ready sellers and interested buyers.

Accumulation of Client Information

Through these strategies, brands also end up accumulating a range of personal information about these customers in form of demographic information, contact information, behavioural patterns, likes and dislikes. This information is gathered through a multiple sources such as online registrations, promotional forms, surveys, social media and order placement pages. Behavioural information is quintessentially gathered through cookies which help tracking data such as time spent on pages, browsing data etc.

The Significance of Customer Privacy

With the exponential growth of the web and the practice of internet marketing strategies, there have been raising concerns over customer privacy and the need to put in place methods that minimize exploitation of acquired information.

The increasing number of cases in information fraud has resulted in development and application of tools which enable disguised searches, criminal background and verification checks. Websites such as online dating and job portals also need to conduct continuous checks on registrants to ensure that the individuals registering with them are authentic and have no ulterior motives.

Internet Marketing versus Spamming

A very common misuse of user information occurs online when web promotion activities cross the line and move on to spamming the users they build databases of. As a business or a brand, it is considered unethical to misuse data gathered and shared it with unauthorized parties especially when what they do with this data it s out of one’s control.

As long as a user volunteers to receive communications from a website, it is justified to engage with them through direct emails. Over and above that, bombarding their inbox with messages is simply considered to be unethical.

Ethics in Web Promotions and Information Privacy

With more and more businesses venturing into the e-commerce space, this issue is more crucial now than ever. Government authorities and businesses are yet to design stringent policies that protect users and encourage responsible handling and management of client information.

The global nature of the web combined with ambiguity in this relatively new method of conducting business has resulted slow progress in this space. Vancouver based internet marketing experts have been focusing on putting in place completely secure strategies by collaborating with international and self-regulatory bodies.

It is not like the issue is not being addressed at all, but there is still tremendous need for a collaborative and global effort to face the challenges put forth with respect of internet privacy in general.

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