ABSTRACT
The rapid commercial evolution of the World Wide Web has resulted in an environment where consumers engage directly with businesses in a variety of ways and levels of interactivity. This has resulted in a conflict between the need for identifying individual consumers in buyer—seller interactions through the use of personal data and their desire to protect this personal data. This paper contributes to the discussion of new developments in online marketing by investigating the potential for a profiling system managed by individual consumers with a view to allowing role-specific privacy. Challenging the accepted notion of organisations being the sole managers of data about individuals, the research starts from the hypothetical point where individual consumers manage and distribute their own data. Using the means—end approach, an initial survey was followed by in-depth interviews and a self-completion questionnaire. These were analysed according to a variation of the laddering interview technique. Benefits and concerns raised by respondents are discussed and a consumer-managed profiling system is introduced that could overcome the conflict between the need for consumers to participate in contemporary societies and their desire to seek projection from the unnecessary collection of their personal data.
