Studying the Impact of Privacy Information on Online Purchase Decisions

Search engines play an important role in helping users find desired content. With the increasing deployment of computerreadable privacy policies encoded using the standard W3C Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) format, search engines also have the potential to help users identify web sites that match their privacy preferences. We implemented a “privacy-enhanced” search engine to aid users in choosing web sites that meet their privacy needs. While we conducted a study to determine the rate of P3P adoption and whether or not most searches yield multiple P3P-enabled web sites, we now wish to conduct user studies. User studies may help establish whether or not the tool is intuitive, and whether or not users actually care about web site privacy practices. In this paper, we outline our motivation and methodology for these studies. Specifically, we plan on conducting at least three different user studies to determine whether users care about privacy when making shopping decisions, what aspects of privacy they care most about, and whether or not our service intuitively addresses these privacy concerns.