Consumer Empowerment and Its Impact on Information Privacy Concerns and Trust: A Theoretical Model

This paper proposes a theoretical model incorporating information privacy concerns and consumers’ options and rights as the two antecedents for trust in an organization. We posit that by providing the users with choice and access to the information collected about them, an organization can help reduce the tensions that arise due to consumer’s information privacy concerns while increasing the trust in that organization, which is a critical factor in stimulating purchases over internet, especially at this early stage of commercial development (Quelch and Klein 1996).