Week 3 Article: The Rising Price of Privacy

Article Reference:
Title: The Rising Price of Privacy. By: Smith, Steve, EContent, 15252531, Apr2008, Vol. 31, Issue 3
Database: Business Source Premier

Summary: The article discusses how the online companies intrude online privacy without the consumer’s knowledge and use this data for new business generation, marketing campaigns etc. The attitude of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also has been very callous and failed to regulate and enforce strict guidelines with regards to behavioral targeting.
Consumers are more concerned of online theft and fraud and are less worried about websites tracking their online behavior and sharing that information across platforms.

Some advocacy groups have recommended to FTC that monitoring user behavior thru websites should be deemed unfair trade practice because many of the users are unaware that their online movements are being profiled.

The authors warns that before the privacy issues multiply and create a big concern, consumers need to act and recommend strict guidelines to be enforced by governments and industries.

The article talks about the ethical and moral dimensions as discussed in chapter 4.
In my opinion this article gets us to the next big questions namely
Which is about the unknown profiling happening without our knowledge?
What other technology improvements and advances are being used by companies to monitor consumer behavior?
And
How much of our likes and dislikes is being monitored and shared across industries and applications?