Influence of the Privacy Bird® user agent on user trust of different web sites

With increasing growth of Internet commerce, online fraud accounts for as much as 20% of identity theft cases. The present study evaluated Privacy Bird®, a computer program that warns users of privacy preference violations by displaying a colored bird. Users rated their trust of, and willingness to give financial information to, web sites in three categories (financial, retail, and social networking) before and after using Privacy Bird. Privacy Bird improved participants’ privacy practices, increasing their trust in (and willingness to provide financial information to) web sites that yielded green birds, reducing it for sites that yielded red birds, and inducing further consideration of policies for sites that yielded yellow birds. These results suggest that e-commerce sites should address the privacy concerns of users and make salient the cues that inform users that their privacy is protected.