ethics for e- comerce

1. ETHICS IN E-COMMERCE AND
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

3. Ethics in Web Business
Policies
 Some businesses send spamming messages to people’s
inboxes to see who it can get to purchase their
product or service.
 The web is controlled by a community of web surfers.
 There are limited amounts of laws online so
enforcement is done by a community of people that
use the internet.

4. Ethics in Web Business Policies Continued
 The government has some programs to monitor how
online businesses are doing e-commerce,
 a quote on this topic that is interesting is “The
programs are as effective as an umbrella in a cat 5
hurricane.”
 Harder to gain trust on line because you don’t know
the people and they don’t know you.

5. Ethics in Web Business Policies Continued
 Ethics is important if you want
people to trust you and to do
business with you.
 steps you can use to gain customers
trust. These are:
 Post Your Business Policies
 Honor Your Policies
 Protect Your Buyer’s Privacy and Security
 Data Mining - They discuss how
businesses get customers personal
information to better understand the
customer’s needs and so forth. They
go on to discuss that this is legal, but
is it ethical..

6. Unethical policies used by some online
business Continued
 Spam – Email that is sent to thousands of random
email addresses for a purpose. Some business will
send their ads to people’s emails to gain new
customers and increase sales.
 Typo squatting - Purchasing a domain name that is
a variation on a popular domain name with the
expectation that the site will get traffic off of the
original sight because of a user's misspelling of the
name. For example, registering the domain names
webapedia.com or yahooo.com in the hopes that
someone making a typo will get to that site
unexpectedly.

7.  Bait and Switch – When a company has a ad
that most of the time sounds to good to be
true, to get people on their site and then
once they are on the site the customer finds
out what the ad said isn’t entirely true or
misleading. Example: Ad claims $10 laptop
(while supplies last) there was one a while
ago that was 10 years old, but that ad wasn’t
lying, but it was misleading and it got the
customer onto their site.
 Adware - A form of spyware that collects
information about the user in order to
display advertisements in the Web browser
based on the information it collects from the
user's browsing patterns.

8. Communicating With Children
Benefits of the internet for children
 Educational tool
 Meeting others with similar interests
 Entertainment

9. Communicating With Children
Governmental Laws Continued
 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) –
restrictions of data collection from children from
electronic commerce sites aimed toward children.
 does not regulate content
 2001 Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA)
– requires schools that receive federal funds to install filtering
software

10. Communicating With Children
Marketing to Children Continued
 Some sites ask children to fill out surveys asking about
preferences, buying behaviors, other members of their
family and personal information.
 They may offer free items for intisement as well
 Children may feel inferior to classmates if they do not
have the new items being marketed to them
 Advertisers hire psychologists to help their marketing
campaigns aim better at children more effectively

11. Communicating With Children
How Parent can Protect Their
Children
 monitor and limit their children’s
access to the internet
 keep themselves informed on
internet safety
 software that can protect children
 teach their children the dangers of
the internet and how someone may
target them
 teach children what to do if they
think they are being targeted
 prime example = chat rooms and who
is appropriate to talk to, what to
disclose

12. Legal and Privacy Issues

13. Legal Issues: Privacy on the
Internet
 Right to Privacy
 Individual privacy vs. meeting consumer needs
 Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 establishes
a set of regulations concerning the mgmt of consumer
info
 Network Advertising Initiative (NAI)
 July 1999
 NAI represents 90% of Web advertisers
 Established to determine the proper protocols for
managing a Web user’s personal info on the Internet
Deitel, et al., 2001

14. Legal Issues: Privacy on the
Internet
 Cookies
 “…bits of info collected and stored by a Web browser
when a person navigates the Web.”
 Online Profiling
 “…aggregating data about customers by tracking their
clickstream.”
Allen, et al., 2001

15. Marketing
 Internet marketing research
 Internet allows for a relaxed and anonymous setting to
hold focus-group discussions and distribute
questionnaires
 Can learn about the demographics of Internet and
WWW users in order to target marketing campaigns
more effectively
 Can segment market into groups that have similar
characteristics and interests

16. Marketing
 E-mail Marketing
 Inexpensive and effective way to target potential customers
 Opt-in email – sent only to people who have expressed their
consent to receiving commercial messages before the first
message was sent to them
 Promotions
 Can attract visitors to sites and influence purchasing
 Can be used to increase brand loyalty through reward programs
 Frequent-flyer miles, point-based rewards, discounts,
sweepstakes, free trials, free shipping and coupons

17. Marketing
 E-business Advertising
 Traditional channels such as TV,
movies, newspapers and
magazines
 Online advertising
 Banner advertising
 Webcasting – using streaming
media to broadcast an event over
the Web
 Public relations
 Chat sessions, bulletin board on
Web site, etc.

19. Copyrights
 Established in the U.S. Constitution
 Article I, section 8, clause 8
 Grants creators of original works the right to
 Distribute
 Display
 Perform
 Reproduce work
 Prepare derivative works based upon the work
 Author may grant exclusive right to others
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20. Copyrights (continued)
 Types of work that can be copyrighted
 Architecture
 Art
 Audiovisual works
 Choreography
 Drama
 Graphics
 Literature
 Motion pictures

21. Copyrights (continued)
 Types of work that can be copyrighted
 Music
 Pantomimes
 Pictures
 Sculptures
 Sound recordings
 Other intellectual works
 As described in Title 17 of U.S. Code
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22. Copyrights (continued)
 Work must fall within one of the preceding categories
 Must be original
 Evaluating originality can cause problems
 Fair use doctrine
 Factors to consider when evaluating the use of
copyrighted material
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23. Patents
 Grant of property rights to inventors
 Issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
(USPTO)
 Permits an owner to exclude the public from making,
using, or selling the protected invention
 Allows legal action against violators
 Prevents independent creation
 Extends only to the United States and its territories
and possessions
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24. Plagiarism
 Theft and passing off of someone’s ideas or words as
one’s own
 Many students
 Do not understand what constitutes plagiarism
 Believe that all electronic content is in the public
domain
 Plagiarism detection systems
 Check submitted material against databases of
electronic content
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25. Plagiarism (continued)
 Steps to combat student plagiarism
 Help students understand what constitutes plagiarism
 Show students how to document Web pages
 Schedule major writing assignments in portions
 Tell students that you know about Internet paper mills
 Educate students about plagiarism detection services
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26. Cybersquatting
 Trademark is anything that enables a consumer to
differentiate one company’s products from another’s
 May be
 Logo
 Package design
 Phrase
 Sound
 Word
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27. Cybersquatting (continued)
 Trademark law
 Trademark’s owner has the right to prevent others from
using the same mark
 Or confusingly similar mark
 Cybersquatters
 Registered domain names for famous trademarks or
company names
 Hope the trademark’s owner would buy the domain
name
 For a large sum of money
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28. Thank you
 Sagar Bavishi (7)
 Prashant Hegde (36)
 Devesh Jha (40)
 Yashodeep Kulkarni
 Moinak Banerjee