Internet marketing and Consumer privacy

The internet marketing is an exciting new marketplace for consumers. It offers easy access not only to a vast array of goods and services, but also to rich sources of information that enable consumers to make better-informed purchasing decisions. It also offers the convenience of shopping from the office or home. This information-rich medium also serves as a source of vast amounts of personal information about consumers.
Commercial Web sites collect personal information explicitly through a variety of means, including registration pages, user surveys, and online contests, application forms, and order forms. Web sites also collect personal information through means that are not obvious to consumers, such as cookies.
Now a days Consumer privacy is a most important concern on the Internet. The surprising expansion of the Internet has created a number of privacy issues that society has never encountered before. Many internet marketing allows anyone to do disguised searches, asset verification checks and criminal background checks on any individual for a nominal fee. Additionally, some websites allows users to order a background check on any individual in the database. This public record report includes property ownership, civil judgments, driver's license physical description and summary of assets. Privacy issues on the Internet relate to two important concerns. The first concern is, users' ability to check the speed, nature, and order of the information they view. Spam is a control concern because it violates privacy, steals resources, and compares to receiving a piece of direct mail with postage due.
A second concern relates to the ability of users to address and understand how organizations collect and use personal information on the Internet. Many Web sites require visitors to identify themselves and provide information about their wants and needs. Some Web sites track visitors' footsteps through the site by storing a cookie, or identifying string of text, on their computers. The use of cookies can be an ethical issue, especially because many users have no idea that this transfer of information is even occurring.
Internet privacy is an important ethical issue because most organizations engaging in e-commerce have not yet developed policies and codes of conduct to encourage responsible behavior. While there have been international regulatory and self-regulatory initiatives to address these issues, there is no global effort to deal with online privacy. The initiatives that have been developed deal with consumer privacy from businesses and trade organizations.

A Web site operator must post a clear and prominent link to a notice of its information practices on its home page and at each area where personal information is collected from children. The notice must state the name and contact information of all operators, the type of personal information collected from children, how such personal information is used, and whether personal information is disclosed to third parties.