Privacy considerations in the adoption of L-Commerce

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Biometrics

Biometrics-Unique and Diverse Applications in Nature, Science, and Technology provides a unique sampling of the diverse ways in which biometrics is integrated into our lives and our technology. From time immemorial, we as humans have been intrigued by, perplexed by, and entertained by observing and analyzing ourselves and the natural world around us. Science and technology have evolved to a point where we can empirically record a measure of a biological or behavioral feature and use it for recognizing patterns, trends, and or discrete phenomena, such as individuals' and this is what biometrics is all about. Understanding some of the ways in which we use biometrics and for what specific purposes is what this book is all about

An Empirical Investigation of Internet Privacy: Customer Behaviour, Companies’ Privacy Policy Disclosures, and a Gap

Privacy emerges as a critical issue in an e-commerce environment because of a fundamental tension among corporate, consumer, and government interests. By reviewing prior Internet-privacy research in the fields of information systems, business, and marketing published between 1995 and 2006, we consider the following research questions: 1) how an individual’s privacy behaviour is affected by privacy policy disclosures and by the level of the individual’s involvement regarding the sensitivity of personal information; 2) how companies’ privacy policies vary with respect to regulatory approaches and cultural values; and 3) whether there is a gap between the privacy practices valued by individuals and those emphasized by companies. A three-stage study is conducted to answer these questions. The first two stages, consisting of a Web-based survey and an online ordering experiment with 210 participants, found that individuals are more likely to read the privacy policy statements posted on Web sites and less likely to provide personal information, when they are under a high privacy involved situation as compared to being in a low privacy involved situation. However, the existence of a privacy seal did not affect individuals’ behaviour, regardless of involvement conditions. This study also found a gap between self-reported privacy behaviour and actual privacy behaviour. When individuals were requested to provide personal information, their privacy policy statement reading behaviour was close to their self-report behaviour. However, their personal information providing behaviour was different from their self-reported behaviour. The third stage, which entailed the study of 420 privacy policies spanning six countries and two industries, showed that privacy policies vary across countries, as well as with varying governmental involvement and cultural values in those countries. Finally, the analysis of all the three stages revealed a gap between individuals’ importance ratings of companies’ privacy practices and policies that companies emphasize in their privacy disclosures

InfoTech Update, Volume 16, Number 2, March/April 2007

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_news/5021/thumbnail.jp

Risk assessment of email accounts: Difference between perception and reality

The use of Internet is associated with a growing number of security threats. This thesis analyzes how users perceive the security of their email account based on the email account provider. With our study, we aim to contribute to the information security systems literature in three ways: First, by taking a more complete view on security online, and reviewing the concept of usable security, usability, human-computer interaction, trust and user perception. Second, by performing an analysis of providers of online services specifically emails. Third, by applying a renowned risk analysis method called Information Security Risk Analysis Method (ISRAM) for risk assessment. The ISRAM analysis revealed that Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo email accounts have a medium risk level, while the reality analysis demonstrated no clearly more secure account provider with only low level risk counts

Trustworthiness in Social Big Data Incorporating Semantic Analysis, Machine Learning and Distributed Data Processing

This thesis presents several state-of-the-art approaches constructed for the purpose of (i) studying the trustworthiness of users in Online Social Network platforms, (ii) deriving concealed knowledge from their textual content, and (iii) classifying and predicting the domain knowledge of users and their content. The developed approaches are refined through proof-of-concept experiments, several benchmark comparisons, and appropriate and rigorous evaluation metrics to verify and validate their effectiveness and efficiency, and hence, those of the applied frameworks

Implementation and analysis of a direct multidisplay repository

When several information items are presented simultaneously, the potential exists for users to interact with information in a rich and rewarding way. The MultiBrowser system supports such interaction via an information foraging style of hypermedia browsing. Multiple windows, colored bars that provide visual cues, and automatically inserted hyperlinks among the paragraphs in a document set contribute to the structure of repositories created by MultiBrowser. These repositories are browsable over the Web using an ordinary Web browser.;Using these repositories as a platform, we investigate hypertext repositories with automatically generated hyperlinks among paragraphs. The algorithms that generate the links yield results with significant common characteristics despite large differences among the algorithms. Furthermore, different repositories generated from the return lists of different search engines show significant common characteristics. Finally, repositories generated for different domains also have common characteristics. This suggests that these characteristics are pervasive properties of judiciously retrieved document sets. The common characteristics revolve around a tendency for some documents (called the kernel) to be destinations of a disproportionately high fraction of the hyperlinks in the repository. An emergent property of such repositories with practical significance is that browsing activities will have a tendency to trap users within the kernel, perhaps without them realizing it. To enable users to choose to avoid being trapped, we propose a ring structure for hypertext repositories. This structure is exposed to the user by annotations to the hyperlinks

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio