Consent as a threat. A critical approach to privacy negotiation in e-commerce practices

Abstract

Although e-commerce systems are increasingly concerned with data protection, they follow a property-based approach to privacy which leads to privacy negotiation and bargaining upon the base of the data subjects' consent. After considering the technological and regulative strategies of protecting consumer privacy, this paper discusses the shortcomings of that approach and claims that, as long as a general privacy culture has not yet evolved in the (web) society, it might collide with the notion of data protection as a fundamental right. © Springer-Verlag 2004.