Kiyoshi Murata    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Commerce    Position   Professor
Date	2013/07/09
Presentation Theme	Does Online Privacy Protection Pay?
Conference	The Third Asian Privacy Scholars Network Conference
Promoters	The University of Hong Kong
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Collaborative
Publisher and common publisher	Kiyoshi Murata, Yohko Orito and Yasunori Fukuta
Details	In the market economy system, which has been separated from communities as an autonomous system long before, information related to a price signal such as of profit, cost, productivity and competition tends to be considered as a matter of concern and, in contrast, any other information as just a noise. Actually, in the current business environment where market-economy principles based on neoliberalism have spread globally, the vast majority of business people as well as scholars seem to believe that only information which has relevance to a price signal is significant for business organisations. On the other hand, it is alleged that companies' proactive engagement in online privacy protection, which in particular is recognisable to their stakeholders, functions as a tool to engender the stakeholders' trust in their personal information handling and business activities. Simultaneously, however, there are a significant number of business people who don't hesitate to reveal their belief that the engagement with online privacy protection is a necessary evil or unnecessary cost. They allege that the enforcement of personal information/privacy laws necessarily forces companies to comply with the laws, which would cause an increase in cost of information management and lead to a compliance depression. The questionnaire surveys of Japanese youngsters' attitude towards online privacy and the follow-up interviews with them conducted by the authors in 2008, 2010 and 2013 seemingly support those allegations. In this study, the authors examine whether online privacy protection is a necessary evil for businesses based on the survey results from pro-privacy perspective.