Increasing Trust Towards eCommerce Privacy Enhancing Technologies Against Price Discrimination

Price discrimination is a recently introduced practice in the domain of eCommerce. It is manifested by the appearance of different prices when the same product is browsed by different prospective buyers, based on their profiles. Thus, for instance, the price of an item may increase at the instance it is browsed by a user coming from a rich neighbourhood or has performed a series of purchases of expensive objects in the past. Price discrimination can lead to decrease of profits and loss of clientele, in the long run, as well as decrease of people's trust towards eCommerce. In this paper, we propose the deployment of Privacy Enhancing Technologies in order to handle users' personal information. These technologies empower users to have command over their own privacy by allowing them to reveal only what is absolutely necessary (minimal disclosure principle), or what they agree to reveal, in order to use a service avoiding any Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Thus, eCommerce services that employ such technologies for handling their clients' personal data can attract more loyal clients, increase their popularity while, at the same time, suffer from minimal client data and company image loss in case of a massive customer data theft attacks.