z-Commerce: Designing a Data-Minimizing One-Click Checkout Solution

in Design Science Research for a New Society: Society 5.0 (2023)

E-commerce has grown rapidly over the past years, with prevailing e-commerce platforms aggregating large amounts of customer data. This practice has several undesirable side effects, such as facilitating ... [more ▼]

E-commerce has grown rapidly over the past years, with prevailing e-commerce platforms aggregating large amounts of customer data. This practice has several undesirable side effects, such as facilitating profiling that may lead to price discrimination and data feedback loops that can hamper competition. Moreover, data hoarding carries security risks through data breaches and undermines customers' privacy expectations. On the other hand, convenience aspects and compliance regulation demand the processing and storage of user-related data. To address this tension field, we aim to conceptualize and iteratively refine a data-minimizinig e-commerce platform. Following a design science research approach, we identify design objectives and propose and implement a solution in which stakeholders receive only customer data that is indispensable for their part of the process. Our solution leverages digital identity wallets and general-purpose zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs). We aim to perform a criteria-based evaluation to assess our artifact's feasibility and fitness from an interdisciplinary perspective. With our results, we hope to illustrate that combining state-of-the-art cryptographic techniques and an emerging digital identity paradigm allows reaching the user experience of incumbent e-commerce platforms while mitigating the undesirable socio-economic side effects of avoidable data disclosure. [less ▲]