Privacy in E-commerce:: Stated preferences vs. actual behavior

The results form a large scale online shopping experiment of information revelation form online users are discussed. The development of a privacy enhancing technology (PET) building on current research in identity management systems is also discussed. To support the rich and service-dependent interaction users desire, the requirements for privacy protection such as PET must always be under the full control of the user, To measure information quality, an index called personal consumer information cost (PCIC) is developed that considers each answered question's ligitimacy and importance in the sales context, as well as the difficulty of answering it. PET represents a more timely privacy protection and trust tool for modern web applications.