Companies in the past have had great difficulty in the collection, organization, and retrieval of information from consumers. Usually this data was organized manually, requiring services from different agencies to create a consumer profile. The process was complex, sluggish, and expensive for one to gather such material. However thanks to the Internet, and now powerful computers and targeting algorithms in association with large-scale databases, has simplified this process and enhanced its yield greatly in Ecommerce. The Internet offers numerous opportunities to collect this information about individuals, questioning the ethical values at hand and justifications on how this data is mined.
The most common and well-known method of tracking one’s online activities are cookies. Cookies in short, help identify consumers for future visits for businesses which enable them to provide a more personalized online experience. It allows websites to gather detailed information about a user’s preferences, interests, and surfing patterns (browser history) which helps create a more accurate user profile than methods of tracking such as web registrations or surveys. The reason cookies are more accurate is because users tend to provide false, inaccurate information in these forums. However these forums are still a major method of collecting one’s EC data, where personal information is shared voluntarily in exchange of some other benefits such as a download or access to a website’s content.
In turn, this aids in the creation of a transaction log which is a record of one’s activities at a site. It states where users are coming from, their frequency of visits, navigation through a website, and even purchasing information from the shopping cart. All t...
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...e speech, and legal/ethical issues cannot be ignored. Providing protection for this data requires careful reconsideration of the business community’s interests in promoting Ecommerce, the government’s interests in promoting economic growth and protecting their citizens, and of course the interests of users in protecting themselves from intrusive expansion by governments and businesses in their personal lives. Protecting user privacy in Ecommerce will require the utilization of all the tools available through legislation, public education, self-regulation, and the technology itself we all use. This is no doubt an ongoing debate about the ethical values, and laws at hand for privacy concerns. Privacy rights protection is one of the most controversial and expressive issues in Ecommerce, and will be not ignored until handled appropriately, respectfully, and responsibly.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, a data broker is a company that packages consumer information from numerous sources and sells this consumer information to other businesses or people (Katz, par 2). Throughout this paper, I will employ course materials, class debates, and lecture notes to analyze a data broker company operating under the name of Spokeo. First, I will also evaluate how and why data brokers, particularly Spokeo, package and sell consumer information. Then, I will examine various characteristics of Spokeo with regards to Daniel Kahneman’s Prospect Theory. Thirdly, I will consider and analyze aspects of Spokeo taking into account William Prosser’s four legal aspects of privacy. Finally, I will discuss what packaging and selling consumer information may mean for consumers’ attitudes and
In the Engineering and Technology Journal, two engineers, Gareth Mitchell and Guy Clapperton, gave their thoughts on both sides of the privacy issue. Is gathering information violating personal privacy? They made their arguments using currency as a metaphor for personal information and online services a product. Mitchell argues the case that giving out personal information is “too high a price to pay” (Mitchell, 2013, p. 26). He says that despite the option to opt out of cookies and certain information, many sites are more covert and make their opt out option less accessible than a pop up asking to opt out. The site makes it hard for the Internet user to say no to being tracked. Mitchell warns the reader to take more consideration into what information they are giving away and that “privacy is not to be taken for granted” (Mitchell, 2013, p. 26). Getting information from the Internet would mean tra...
B2B merchants must prevent unauthorized access to customer information on their Web sites, and protect the privacy of...
The most lucrative business on the Internet is marketing. Companies have come up with ingenious ways to generate revenue with very targeted advertising. Each company has their unique method to identify their consumers, some more complicated than others. For example, on a website geared to new mothers the advertisements would reflect that by advertising for baby diapers or formula. This type of targeted advertising is understood and acceptable. The consumer benefits by having advertisements in their interests and the vendor has a higher likelihood of making a sale. The Internet has introduced novel ways to track consumer habits and interests thereby creating smarter advertising. Microsoft employs their browser Internet Explorer using “cookies” to track user habits. Cookies are pieces of text stored by a user’s web browser, they are sent back and forth every time a user accesses a web page. These can be tracked to follow web surfers’ actions. Cookies are used to store...
Did you know that almost everything you do on the internet is being tracked and recorded in some way? In the Article, George Orwell… Meet Mark Zuckerberg, by Lori Andrews, Andrews talks about how behavioral advertising, which is the tracking of consumer’s online activities in order to bring custom-made advertisements, is a topic that is concealed to many people and can cause damage. Search engines like Google store the searches you have made and in 2006 there were search logs released which had personal information that people were judged by (Andrews 716-717). Data aggregation is the main way Facebook makes its money. Andrews believes that it’s an invasion of privacy and is not known well enough by the public. This article is aimed at young and new internet users that are ignorant of the possible dangers on the web. Lori Andrews is successful at informing novice users about the dangers of behavioral
Third party cookies enables single-sign-on authentication (e.g. Facebook Login), web analytics (e.g. Google Analytics), and third-party advertisements [1].3rd-party cookies enable 'third parties' - websites other than those the user explicitly visits in their browser's address bar or sees on their screen - to record the user's browsing history. The third party can then archive, analyse, and/or trade, sell the information they've recorded [2]. If a first-party website is untrustworthy, users may decline to visit it. But, since users are unaware of the very existence of many third-party websites, they cannot reward responsible sites and penalize irresponsible sites. Thus, Risks associated with third-party tracking are heightened by the lack of market pressure to exercise good security and privacy practices
If you have ever used the internet than you probably know that almost every website today asks for some type of your personal information. Today, identity theft is becoming more and more common. Websites used to promise more security for consumers, and today websites are no longer offering the same protection. With more and more people shopping online, criminals are gaining access to innocent shoppers’ identities easier than ever. Companies are using consumer information to help target the individual for sales of things they like. Many people are worried that these companies have gone too far and that the information is an invasion of privacy.
When dealing with hardship you should not forget to follow your policies and be honest. Although many online businesses are accepting the importance of website, but the potential of ethical concerns still dawdles in this situation. Because of the tremendous growth of e-commerce, it has sparked ethical concerns about privacy, deception, intellectual property, and marketing to children. One such company deceived its customers about its policy and promise. On June 9, 2000 Toysmart was a Disney owned internet vender of educational toys and games filled for bankruptcy. Toysmart placed ads to pay its investors. The ad encompassed detailed information of more than 200,000 customers, each customer worth up to $500. The offer included customer’s addresses, billing information, family information and names.
6. Daniel Lin, Michael C. Loui, "Taking the Byte Out of Cookies: Privacy, Consent, and the Web" Computers and Society, June 1998.
The natural progression of the Internet and emerging technologies is towards streamlining our lives both personally and professionally. Instantaneous communications and available on-line services continue to reduce the physical distance between individuals. Almost anything is now available in cyberspace from shopping, schooling and education, on-line trading, banking, to social and political on-line communities. On-line service providers are shifting from a product centric approach to a more personal and customized approach to marketing their products and services. The idea of one-to-one marketing is very powerful and has become an important tool for competing in the interactive age. One-to-one marketing takes a customer-orientated approach to selling; customers are treated as individuals with different interests and needs. We respond positively to individual attention; when we visit a web site we want to see products and services of interest to us not every available product. We do not want to waste our time. For many people, time is money and the convenience factor ways heavily on the decision to return to a web site.
Today, many web sites on the internet can use "cookies" to keep track of passwords and usernames and track the sites a particular user visits (Cookiecentral.com). But, the use of cookies to track user's browsing habits is becoming a concern of many internet users. These concerned people are beginning to think of cookies as an invasion of privacy. Companies with web sites can use cookies to track what sites you visit frequently and then select specific ad banners to send to you on the web while surfing (Cookiecentral.com). Electronic Frontier Foundation's program director, Stanton McCandlish points out, "The potential problem is that companies without a sense of ethics could be doing [the] same thing and selling addresses to offline marketers" (news.cnet.com). The government should realize the hazards of internet cookies and enforce a ban on their use.
At the beginning, the causes of the problem can be classified into three aspects: transferring personal data to others without consumers’ consent, lacking awareness on the protection of privacy and leaking the personal data unintentionally. The leakage of the personal data can be in the form of keeping and transmitting personal data insecurely and then stealing by crackers. There is no controversy on this cause- it is apparently a crime, hence, not discussed in this essay. One common torment of companies is that they are not renowned. Consumer personal information includi...
An ecommerce privacy policy should be accurate, clear, concise and easy to find on a website. Its appearance serves as a tool of protection to your online business from one side and a tool of protecting customers’ personal information from the other. It also acts as an effective means of being transparent and credible, keeping company accountable for the personal sensitive data it collects, and building trust with its customers and visitors who access its site (Siassios, 2015).
In the record of the web log server, clustering will be carry out to identify and group the information such as gender, name, phone number, e-mail address and so on into cluster. This will help the website to always keep contact with the users and know about their needs in order to exploit the website business market and also improve the web presence.
...try to ensure Internet security. More practically, marketers must try to target consumer groups more accurately. Minimizing unwanted consumer contacts may reduce the intensity and visibility of some dimensions of privacy issues. Last, marketing researchers must attempt to define privacy operationally. Much has been said and written about consumer privacy, but we still have little understanding of what information consumers consider private, why they consider it private, and whether this set of information changes situationally or in response to other factors.