Regulatory Privacy Practices in Europe

In today’s global economy, the flow of information is essential for the growth of international commerce and for the cross border access for both B2B and B2C services. The e-commerce phenomenon has elevated the privacy issue to a global platform. This paper examines the extent to which sample firms in four European countries post privacy notices on their websites. While posted privacy policy does not necessarily mean compliance with privacy protection policy, the absence of it indicates failure to comply with the most basic principle of privacy protection. We also reviewed the posted privacy policies of 425 firms and evaluated them against their corresponding country’s directives as well as fair information policies of the US. Descriptive statistics from the collected data provide a preliminary indication of how privacy practices are observed in our samples of four European countries.