Guest editorial: Consumer privacy in the technological era

Abstract

The development of internet technology facilitated the online collection, storage, retrieval, manipulation and transmission of an individual’s personal information, resulting in a new stream of information privacy research, i.e. online information privacy (Acquisti et al., 2012; Jebarajakirthy et al., 2021; Maseeh et al., 2021; Yun et al., 2019). Online information privacy became a serious concern after the introduction of e-commerce websites (Lwin et al., 2007; Turban et al., 2017) because such websites require individuals’ personal information while creating an account with them. Further advancements in digital technologies, such as smartphone applications, cloud computing technology, artificial intelligence (AI), wearable devices, drones, robotics and autonomous vehicles, brought new conceptions in the online information privacy concerns (Conger et al., 2013). Big data is another technological development enabling organisations to handle a massive amount of data in various formats, such as website texts, audio and video data from social networking sites, location data from mobile location-based services, medical laboratories data and RFID tags (Erevelles et al., 2016; Sathi, 2013). Regardless of the richness of big data, it raises severe issues of information privacy and is considered a “troubling manifestation of Big Brother” (Boyd andCrawford, 2012). The online information privacy concerns are one of the main challenges for organisations with every new technology brings its own privacy concerns and risks (Conger et al., 2013; Smith et al., 2011; Westin, 2003). However, little is known about consumer privacy in the context of digital marketing (Martin and Murphy, 2017). Therefore, the present special issue has been called to prompt a thorough investigation of consumer privacy in the present era of ultra-high-tech advancements.