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Revisiting the role of web assurance seals in consumer trust

Published: 25 March 2004 Publication History

Abstract

There is conflicting evidence as to the current level of awareness and impact of Web assurance seal services (WASSs). This study examines consumers' awareness of WASSs and consumers' perceived importance of assurance seals found on business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce websites. We further examine whether an intervention to increase consumers' knowledge of security and privacy threats, as well as informing them of the function of WASSs increases perceived importance of web assurance seals. We find that educating consumers about security and privacy threats, as well as the role of web assurance seals does increase awareness and perceived importance the seals, but interestingly consumers still are not likely to use these seals as an indicator of the trustworthiness of site. Moreover, there is no difference after the intervention in perceived security and privacy of a vendor's site, suggesting that consumers obtain these cues from other factors. After the intervention, the strongest predictor of perceived security remains consumers' assessment of the quality of the information provided on the site. However, the perceived privacy afforded by a vendor was no longer predicated by perceived information quality.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEC '04: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Electronic commerce
March 2004
684 pages
ISBN:1581139306
DOI:10.1145/1052220
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 March 2004

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Author Tags

  1. assurance seal service
  2. awareness of assurance seal service
  3. information quality
  4. online privacy
  5. online security

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Cited By

View all
  • (2019)Converting hotels website visitors into buyersInformation Technology & People10.1108/ITP-12-2017-0446Online publication date: 13-May-2019
  • (2012)Basing Cybersecurity Training on User PerceptionsIEEE Security and Privacy10.1109/MSP.2011.18010:2(40-49)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2012
  • (2011)Privacy preservation for personalised services in smart spaces2011 Baltic Congress on Future Internet and Communications10.1109/BCFIC-RIGA.2011.5733234(181-189)Online publication date: Feb-2011
  • (2010)Privacy policy enforcement for ambient ubiquitous servicesProceedings of the First international joint conference on Ambient intelligence10.5555/1926743.1926771(265-269)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2010
  • (2007)Exploratory survey on an Evaluation Model for a Sense of SecurityNew Approaches for Security, Privacy and Trust in Complex Environments10.1007/978-0-387-72367-9_11(121-132)Online publication date: 2007

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