A Comparative Study on Consumer Right to Privacy in E-Commerce

The number of electronic commerce (e-commerce) transactions has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The right to privacy is particularly important in e-commerce. Recently, the privacy protection for consumer transactions has become more and more important in e-commerce. This paper aims to develop the study on the legislation of e-commerce consumer rights protection. It is a comparative study on relevant regulations of the right to privacy in European Union, the United States, and Japan. The most representative policy might be the Data Protection Directive in the EU, which not only regulates the principle for e-commerce consumer right to privacy protection, but also lays out specific criteria to be abided. The current status and existing problems in China are also analyzed and some suggestions are made to improve the legal system of right to privacy. The paper identifies directions for the future development of the privacy protection from a legal perspective.