The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is one of many organizations studying influences on consumer privacy online. The authors investigate these influences, taking into consideration the current body of literature on privacy and the Internet and the FTC's core principles of fair information practice. The authors analyze these influences to assess the underlying factors of privacy concern online. The authors examine the current recommendations and actions of the FTC in light of the results of an e-mail survey of online consumers in the United States that assessed their attitudes toward privacy online. The authors find that the FTC's core principles address many of online consumers’ privacy concerns. However, two factors not directly incorporated in the five principles, the relationships between entities and online users and the exchange of information for appropriate compensation, may influence consumers’ privacy concerns.

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Given the explosion of research in the past decade that has examined the Aad‐Ab‐PI relationship using adult subjects, one would expect to see an almost parallel stream of research involving children. However, as is evident in Brown and Stayman's (1992) meta‐analysis of the literature, no studies investigating this area have used children as the sample. This study provides an initial exploration into the Aad‐Ab‐PI relationship in children with specific focus given to the impact of brand familiarity and measurement timing while controlling for prior brand attitudes. Forty‐three third graders and sixty‐eight sixth graders participated in a 2 × 2 factorial experiment that manipulated brand familiarity (familiar vs. unfamiliar) and measurement timing (immediate vs. delayed). Similar to the results using adult subjects, the children's Aad measures significantly affected Ab for both familiar and unfamiliar brands, even after controlling for prior brand attitude. However, contrary to adult responses, the children's Aad had a significant, albeit modest, impact on their PI responses. Based on these results, the paper offers implications for marketers and public policy makers and questions for future research. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The Internet's potential for academic and applied research has recently begun to be acknowledged and assessed. To date, researchers have used Web page‐based surveys to study large groups of on‐line users and e‐mail surveys to study smaller, more homogenous on‐line user groups. A relatively untapped use for the Internet is to use e‐mail to survey broader Internet populations on both a national and international basis. Our experience using e‐mail to study a national sample of Internet users is presented, beginning with a discussion of how a sample of on‐line users can be selected using a ‘people finder’ search engine. We include an evaluation of the demographic characteristics of the respondent pool compared to both a web page‐based survey and a telephone survey of Internet users. Considerations for researchers who are evaluating this method for their own studies are provided.

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Parenthood ushers in many situations with which individuals have little experience. Given today’s technology-integrated environment, parents can instantly gain support from a large audience using social media. This support often includes “sharenting,” or regularly using social media to share information about one’s child. Using consumer vulnerability and communications privacy management theory as theoretical foundations, the authors focus on mothers’ vulnerability and how it may translate into increased children’s consumer vulnerability. The in-depth interviews in Study 1 offer insights into mothers’ expressions of vulnerability and how these expressions can be linked to their motivations for sharing children’s personally identifiable information (PII) on social media. In Study 2, the authors observed mothers of young children participating in a Twitter chat hosted by a major children’s brand, examining expressions of mothers’ vulnerability, the extent to which they posted child PII, and the extent to which mothers both expressed vulnerability and posted child PII. The authors discuss public policy and managerial implications for this understudied dimension of children’s online privacy and our increasingly technology-integrated society.