Pharmaceutical companies’ documented and online privacy practices: Development of an index measure and initial test

Consumers have begun to take a more proactive approach to their healthcare by accessing pharmaceutical companies Websites to obtain health and drug information. In exchange for these benefits, companies require consumers to voluntarily disclose information. However, research has shown that consumers continue to be concerned about how their information is managed, used, and distributed by companies, especially if accessed via the Web. To date, there has been limited empirical research to examine the actual online practices of companies when it comes to privacy, especially those of pharmaceutical companies. Using the Delphi expert panel process, we identified the components of a hierarchical benchmarking index to examine the documented and actual online practices of 100 Website registrations with pharmaceutical companies. In this paper, we outline the development of an index to measure the personal information privacy violations of pharmaceutical companies using hierarchical linear technique. Second, we provided empirical evidence regarding the magnitude of voluntary adherence to the Fair Information Practices (FIPs) by pharmaceutical companies based upon the personal information privacy violations. Our results revealed that companies with headquarters in Europe had fewer personal information privacy violations than those in the US. Moreover, our results indicate that fewer personal information privacy violations occur for chronic conditions than for non-chronic conditions, as well as fewer violations occur with Website registrations for updates than for discounts. Finally, both Europe and UK demonstrated more overall adherence to the FIPs than the US and Asia. This suggests that self-regulation may not be sufficient