Cyber-Democracy or Cyber-Hegemony? Exploring the Political and Economic Structures of the Internet as an Alternative Source of Information

Although government regulation of the Internet has been decried as undercutting free speech, the control of Internet content through capitalist gateways???namely, profit-driven software companies???has gone largely uncriticized. The author argues that this discursive trend manufactures consent through a hegemonic force neglecting to confront the invasion of online advertising or marketing strategies directed at children. This study suggests that ???inappropriate content??? (that is, nudity, pornography, obscenities) constitutes a cultural currency through which concerns and responses to the Internet have been articulated within the mainstream. By examining the rhetorical and financial investments of the telecommunications business sector, the author contends that the rhetorical elements creating ???cyber-safety??? concerns within the mainstream attempt to reach the consent of parents and educators by asking them to see some Internet content as value laden (sexuality, trigger words, or adult content), while disguising the interests and authority of profitable computer software and hardware industries (advertising and marketing). Although most online ???safety measures??? neglect to confront the emerging invasion of advertising/marketing directed at children and youth, the author argues that media literacy in cyberspace demands such scrutiny. Unlike measures to block or filter online information, students need an empowerment approach that will enable them to analyze, evaluate, and judge the information they receive.published or submitted for publicatio

A Survey on True-reputation Algorithm for Trustworthy Online Rating System

The average of customer ratings on a product, which we call a reputation, is one of the key factors in online shoping. The common way for customers to express their satisfaction level with their purchases is through online ratings. The overall buyer?s satisfaction is quantified as the aggregated score of all ratings and is available to all buyers. This average score and reputation of a product acts as a guide for online buyers and highly influences consumer?s final purchase decisions. The trustworthiness of a reputation can be achieved when a large number of buyers involved in ratings with honesty. If some users wantedly give unfair ratings to a item, especially when few users have participated, the reputation of the product could easily be modified. In order to improve the trustworthiness of the products in e-commerce sites a new model is proposed with a true - reputation algorithm that repeatedly adjusts the reputation based on the confidence of the user ratings

Reputation Protection on Online Rating Sites

The 21st century has witnessed a blossoming of rating, evaluation or even blacklisting sites. Namely, teachers, lawyers and doctors are rated openly by their students, clients and patients. We are living in a ‘reputation nation,’ where our conducts are evaluated often by anonymous individuals in different aspects, entailing the dangers of shame sanctions. This reputation rating system is far from being a system of formal adjudication. It may carry false or incorrect information, and may not allow an individual to correct such information. Relying on defamation law may not be helpful to the victim targeted as the defendant maybe an anonymous individual expressing his honest opinion. Equally, invoking privacy law may be a frustrating experience when the information is of legitimate public interest and it is already in the public domain. In the absence of satisfactory legal solution and remedies, some have resorted to alternative methods of “reputation management.” What has yet to be addressed is the issue of how to develop a new procedural layout that can accommodate social norms, technological advancement and the legal right to protect reputation on online platforms. This article returns to the fundamental rationale behind the protection of reputation, and argues that reputation is an inherently social and relational concept that serves a significant signaling function in society. Drawing on judicial jurisprudence in the US and Germany on online rating sites, this article advocates for a new regime that requires online rating sites to have appropriate netiquette and information policy, including the right to reply amongst other requirements. This is essential not only to protect individual’s reputation but also for establishing a reliable system for civility.postprin

Securing Online Reputation Systems Through Temporal and Trust Analysis

Securing Online Reputation Systems Through Temporal and Trust Analysi

Employment and Working Conditions of Selected Types of Platform Work

Platform work is a form of employment that uses an online platform to match the supply of and demand for paid labour. In Europe, platform work is still small in scale but is rapidly developing. The types of work offered through platforms are ever-increasing, as are the challenges for existing regulatory frameworks. This report explores the working and employment conditions of three of the most common types of platform work in Europe. For each of these types, Eurofound assesses the physical and social environment, autonomy, employment status and access to social protection, and earnings and taxation based on interviews with platform workers. A comparative analysis of the regulatory frameworks applying to platform work in 18 EU Member States accompanies this review. This looks into workers’ employment status, the formal relationships between clients, workers and platforms, and the organisation and representation of workers and platforms

A Privacy Preserving Distributed Reputation Mechanism

International audienceReputation systems allow to estimate the trustworthiness of entities based on their past behavior. Electronic commerce, peer-to-peer routing and collaborative environments, just to cite a few, highly benefit from using reputation systems. To guarantee an accurate estimation, reputation systems typically rely on a central authority, on the identification and authentication of all the participants, or both. In this paper, we go a step further by presenting a distributed reputation mechanism which is robust against malicious behaviors and that preserves the privacy of its clients. Guaranteed error bounds on the estimation are provided

Rating Fraud Detection---Towards Designing a Trustworthy Reputation Systems

Reputation systems could help consumers avoid transaction risk by providing historical consumers’ feedback. But, traditional reputation systems are vulnerable to the rating manipulation. It will undermine the trustworthiness of the reputation systems and users’ satisfaction will be lost. To address the issue, this study uses the real-world rating data from two travel website: Tripadvisor.com and Expedia.com and one e-commerce website Amazon.com to empirically exploit the features of fraudulent raters. Based on those features, it proposes the new method for fraudulent rater detection. First, it examines the received rating series of each entity and filter out the entity which is under attack (termed as target entity). Second, the clustering based method is applied to discriminate fraudulent raters. Experimental studies have shown that the proposed method is effective in detecting the fraudulent raters accurately while keeping the majority of the normal users in the systems in various attack environment settings