Marketing, Consumers and Technology: Perspectives for Enhancing Ethical Transactions

The advance of technology has influenced marketing in a number of ways that have ethical implications. Growth in use of the Internet and e-commerce has placed electronic cookies, spyware, spam, RFIDs, and data mining at the forefront of the ethical debate. Some marketers have minimized the significance of these trends. This overview paper examines these issues and introduces the two articles that follow. It is hoped that these entries will further the important marketing and technology ethical debate

The Benefits and Costs of Online Privacy Legislation

Many people are concerned that information about their private life is more readily available and more easily captured on the Internet as compared to offline technologies. Specific concerns include unwanted email, credit card fraud, identity theft, and harassment. This paper analyzes key issues surrounding the protection of online privacy. It makes three important contributions: First, it provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of the estimated benefits and costs of regulating online privacy. Second, it provides the most comprehensive evaluation of legislation and legislative proposals in the U.S. aimed at protecting online privacy. Finally, it offers some policy prescriptions for the regulation of online privacy and suggests areas for future research. After analyzing the current debate on online privacy and assessing the potential costs and benefits of proposed regulations, our specific recommendations concerning the government's involvement in protecting online privacy include the following: The government should fund research that evaluates the effectiveness of existing privacy legislation before considering new regulations. The government should not generally regulate matters of privacy differently based on whether an issue arises online or offline. The government should not require a Web site to provide notification of its privacy policy because the vast majority of commercial U.S.-based Web sites already do so. The government should distinguish between how it regulates the use and dissemination of highly sensitive information, such as certain health records or Social Security numbers, versus more general information, such as consumer name and purchasing habits. The government should not require companies to provide consumers broad access to the personal information that is collected online for marketing purposes because the benefits do not appear to be significant and the costs could be quite high. The government should make it easier for the public to obtain information on online privacy and the tools available for consumers to protect their own privacy. The message of this paper is not that online privacy should be unregulated, but rather that policy makers should think through their options carefully, weighing the likely costs and benefits of each proposal.

The Uneasy Case for Patent Federalism

Nationwide uniformity is often considered an essential feature of the patent system, necessary to fulfill that system’s disclosure and incentive purposes. In the last few years, however, more than half the states have enacted laws that seek to disrupt this uniformity by making it harder for patent holders to enforce their patents. There is an easy case to be made against giving states greater authority over the patent system: doing so would threaten to disrupt the system’s balance between innovation incentives and a robust public domain and would permit rent seeking by states that disproportionately produce or consume innovation. There is, nevertheless, an uneasy case that this particular form of patent federalism may be a good thing. The federal patent system has systemic flaws that lead to low-quality patents, nuisance patent litigation, and patent trolls exploiting asymmetric bargaining power. And efforts to address these flaws have faltered, or have had limited effects, due to public-choice dynamics in the patent system, so the scope of patent protections has expanded over time without regard to the system’s purpose of encouraging innovation. States may help address some of these problems not in spite of, but because of, their own flaws. States have their own public-choice dynamics that happen to offset some of the flaws of the federal system. State anti-patent laws have been driven largely by small businesses and local small-business groups, which, unlike most patent holders, have preexisting influence in state government. And the laws they have crafted using this influence are well-targeted to affect only the most troublesome patent cases: nuisance cases, cases asserting low-quality patents, and cases targeting end users. States pushing back with anti-patent laws, then, may represent an effective second-best solution to the problem of harmful patent assertions. Moreover, recognizing the dynamics that led to these laws may provide helpful insights in designing federal patent reforms

The Uneasy Case for Patent Federalism

Nationwide uniformity is often considered an essential feature of the patent system, necessary to fulfill that system’s disclosure and incentive purposes. In the last few years, however, more than half the states have enacted laws that seek to disrupt this uniformity by making it harder for patent holders to enforce their patents. There is an easy case to be made against giving states greater authority over the patent system: doing so would threaten to disrupt the system’s balance between innovation incentives and a robust public domain and would permit rent seeking by states that disproportionately produce or consume innovation. There is, nevertheless, an uneasy case that this particular form of patent federalism may be a good thing. The federal patent system has systemic flaws that lead to low-quality patents, nuisance patent litigation, and patent trolls exploiting asymmetric bargaining power. And efforts to address these flaws have faltered, or have had limited effects, due to public-choice dynamics in the patent system, so the scope of patent protections has expanded over time without regard to the system’s purpose of encouraging innovation. States may help address some of these problems not in spite of, but because of, their own flaws. States have their own public-choice dynamics that happen to offset some of the flaws of the federal system. State anti-patent laws have been driven largely by small businesses and local small-business groups, which, unlike most patent holders, have preexisting influence in state government. And the laws they have crafted using this influence are well-targeted to affect only the most troublesome patent cases: nuisance cases, cases asserting low-quality patents, and cases targeting end users. States pushing back with anti-patent laws, then, may represent an effective second-best solution to the problem of harmful patent assertions. Moreover, recognizing the dynamics that led to these laws may provide helpful insights in designing federal patent reforms

Conceptualizing human resilience in the face of the global epidemiology of cyber attacks

Computer security is a complex global phenomenon where different populations interact, and the infection of one person creates risk for another. Given the dynamics and scope of cyber campaigns, studies of local resilience without reference to global populations are inadequate. In this paper we describe a set of minimal requirements for implementing a global epidemiological infrastructure to understand and respond to large-scale computer security outbreaks. We enumerate the relevant dimensions, the applicable measurement tools, and define a systematic approach to evaluate cyber security resilience. From the experience in conceptualizing and designing a cross-national coordinated phishing resilience evaluation we describe the cultural, logistic, and regulatory challenges to this proposed public health approach to global computer assault resilience. We conclude that mechanisms for systematic evaluations of global attacks and the resilience against those attacks exist. Coordinated global science is needed to address organised global ecrime

Adversarial behaviours knowledge area

The technological advancements witnessed by our society in recent decades have brought improvements in our quality of life, but they have also created a number of opportunities for attackers to cause harm. Before the Internet revolution, most crime and malicious activity generally required a victim and a perpetrator to come into physical contact, and this limited the reach that malicious parties had. Technology has removed the need for physical contact to perform many types of crime, and now attackers can reach victims anywhere in the world, as long as they are connected to the Internet. This has revolutionised the characteristics of crime and warfare, allowing operations that would not have been possible before. In this document, we provide an overview of the malicious operations that are happening on the Internet today. We first provide a taxonomy of malicious activities based on the attacker’s motivations and capabilities, and then move on to the technological and human elements that adversaries require to run a successful operation. We then discuss a number of frameworks that have been proposed to model malicious operations. Since adversarial behaviours are not a purely technical topic, we draw from research in a number of fields (computer science, criminology, war studies). While doing this, we discuss how these frameworks can be used by researchers and practitioners to develop effective mitigations against malicious online operations.Published versio

Spam - solutions and their problems

We analyze the success of filtering as a solution to the spam problem when used alone or concurrently with sender and/or receiver pricing. We find that filters alone may exacerbate the spam problem if the spammer attempts to evade them by sending multiple variants of the message to each consumer. Sender and receiver prices can effectively reduce or eliminating spam, either on their own or when used together with filtering. Finally, we discuss the impli- cations for social welfare of using the different spam controls.Spam; filtering; email; receiver pricing; sender pricing

The Cost Impact of Spam Filters: Measuring the Effect of Information System Technologies in Organizations

More than 70% of global e-mail traffic consists of unsolicited and commercial direct marketing, also known as spam. Dealing with spam incurs high costs for organizations, prompting efforts to try to reduce spam-related costs by installing spam filters. Using modern econometric methods to reduce the selection bias of installing a spam filter, we deploy a unique data setting implemented at a German university to measure the costs associated with spam and the costs savings of spam filters. The applied methodological framework can easily be transferred to estimate the effect of other IS technologies (e.g., SAP) implemented in organizations. Our findings indicate that central IT costs are of little relevance since the majority of spam costs stem from employees who spend working time identifying and deleting spam. The working time losses caused by spam are approximately 1,200 minutes per employee per year; these costs could be reduced by roughly 35% through the installation of a spam filter mechanism. The individual efficiency of a spam filter installation depends on the amount of spam that is received and on the level of knowledge about spam.propensity score matching, treatment effects, spam filter, spam