The Governance of Privacy in Online Transactions in US and EU Context: A Socio-Legal Analysis

The current research investigates the effectiveness of the current USA and EU legal system in governing online transactions by drawing on the various notions embedded in the concept of privacy in general and e-privacy in particular. One of the contributions of the current research is that this research is considered as a socio-legal research that studies both privacy as a social concern and the effectiveness of the current legal system governing this issue specially in USA and EU that are considered as the major global players in e-commerce field. So, the focus of the current research is the users’ perspective of privacy and the concerns raised regarding this concept. The method adopted for the legal perspective is a multiple case study, where both USA and EU legal contexts are explored for effectiveness regarding the governing of e-commerce transactions involving personal data of users. Again, for the social perspective, the researcher conducted interviews with two groups; e-commerce users and lawyers in the area of e-commerce to interviewed to investigate privacy concerns and explore factors affecting relevant laws’ effectiveness regarding protection of personal data. The findings of the study indicate that online users have various challenges in understanding the concept of privacy, its application in e-commerce and the technical methods associated with the breaches of personal data. As for law practitioners, they have argued that the difficulty of resolving privacy right violations lies in the conflict of laws, the non-uniformity of privacy laws, and the lack of a consensus on the need for laws that protect the privacy of users. The study concludes with the call for developing a more coherent and unified law for dealing with online privacy breaches. As for the time being, the soft law has been suggested as one of the most effective ways to protect online personal data and to deal with breaches and violations of such data.