Privacy: Reduce your Customers

Before making a purchase from you, buyers need to trust your company and think that your products and services will do what they are supposed to. Do your marketing and online practices help establish the trust necessary to convince prospects to buy from you? What is the connection between privacy and trust? Evidence shows that the two are closely correlated.

Since the beginning of interpersonal communication, trust has been perhaps the most important influence on information disclosure. Then, when commerce started, people would trade with those individuals whom they trusted and would avoid those who were perceived as non-trust-worthy. Intrinsically subjective and hard to define, trust is a function of the amount and type of control one has in a relationship. Social exchange theory advocates that individuals weigh both the costs and rewards in deciding whether to engage in social transactions. Aided by a little common sense we can conclude that if the rewards outweigh the costs, then the individual is likely to enter into an exchange relationship whereas if the cost outweighs the rewards there will be no exchange. This trade-off occurring inside people