E-Mail Tracking in Online Marketing - Methods, Detection, and Usage

E-Mail tracking uses personalized links and pictures for gathering information on user behavior, for example, where, when, on what kind of device, and how often an e-mail has been read. This information can be very useful for marketing purposes. On the other hand, privacy and security requirements of customers could be violated by tracking. This paper examines how e-mail tracking works, how it can be detected automatically, and to what extent it is used in German e-commerce. We develop a detection model and software tool in order to collect and analyze more than 600 newsletter e-mails from companies of several different industries. The results show that the usage of e-mail tracking in Germany is prevalent but also varies depending on the industry

Posta Elettronica Certificata e domicilio digitale : futuro e incertezze in una prospettiva europea

L\u2019articolo tratta della posta elettronica certificata, onde evidenziarne alcune criticit\ue0. A tal fine, vengono anzitutto inquadrati i principali vantaggi di tale strumento rispetto ai sistemi di posta tradizionali, sottolineando altres\uec il rilievo che la PEC ha oggi assunto nel nostro ordinamento, specie alla luce dello schema di decreto legislativo di modifica del Codice dell\u2019Amministrazione digitale approvato dal Consiglio dei ministri il 20 gennaio 2016. Lo scritto passa quindi a trattare di due delle principali questioni problematiche: il rischio di lock-in degli utenti e la possibilit\ue0 che l\u2019uso della PEC sia limitato per esigenze di effettivit\ue0 del diritto europeo. L\u2019Autore auspica dunque una rivisitazione della PEC, augurandosi che tali criticit\ue0 possano essere risolte e che l\u2019uso di tale strumento possa quindi essere promosso a livello europeo.The article deals with some issues arising from the Italian certified mail (posta elettronica certificata, PEC). To this end, the paper considers first of all the principal advantages of the PEC by comparing it to traditional mail systems, and, secondly, the importance that this system has gained in Italy, especially in light of the draft of the legislative decree amending the Digital Administration Code approved by the Council of Ministers on January 20th, 2016. The author then introduces two of the main issues found from an European perspective: the risk of lock-in of users and the possibility that the use of the PEC in the Italian legal system is limited to guarantee the effectiveness of European law. The author prospects therefore a review of the PEC, hoping that these critical issues can be resolved and that this tool will be exported to Europe

A second generation of nonrepudiation protocols

A non-repudiation protocol from party S to party R performs two tasks. First, the protocol enables party S to send to party R some text x along with sufficient evidence (that can convince a judge) that x was indeed sent by S. Second, the protocol enables party R to receive text x from S and to send to S sufficient evidence (that can convince a judge) that x was indeed received by R. The first generation of non-repudiation protocols were published in the period 1996-2000. In this dissertation, we design a second generation of non-repudiation protocols that enjoy several interesting properties. First, we identify in this dissertation a special class of non-repudiation protocols, called two-phase protocols. The two parties, S and R, in each two-phase protocol execute the protocol as specified until one of the two parties receives its needed proof. Then and only then does this party refrain from sending any more message specified by the protocol because these messages only help the other party complete its proof. We show that the execution of each two-phase protocol is deterministic and does not require synchronized real-time clocks. We also show that each two-phase protocol needs to involve a trusted third party T beside the two original parties, S and R. Second, we show that if party R in a two-phase protocol has a real-time clock and knows an upper bound on the round trip delay from R to S and back to R, then the two-phase protocol does not need to involve a trusted third party T. Third, we design a non-repudiation protocol for transferring file F from a sender S to a receiver R over a cloud C. This protocol is designed such that there is no direct communication between parties S and R. Rather all communications between S and R are carried out through cloud C. In this protocol parties S and R do not need to store a local copy of file F and the proofs that are needed by the two parties S and R (the only copy of file F and the proofs is stored in cloud C). Fourth, we design a new non-repudiation protocol from S to R over C where some of the proofs stored in cloud C get lost. This new protocol has an interesting stabilization property which ensures that when some of the proofs get lost, and one party can get the needed proofs but the other party cannot get its needed proofs from cloud C, then eventually, neither party is able to receive its needed proofs from cloud C. Fifth, we design a non-repudiation protocol for transferring files from a sender S to a subset of potential receivers {R.1, R.2, ..., R.n} over a cloud C. The protocol guarantees that after each file F is transferred from sender S to a subset of the potential receivers, then (1) each receiver R.i in the subset ends up with a proof that file F was indeed sent by sender S to R.i, and (2) sender S ends up with a proof that file F was indeed received from S by each receiver R.i in the subset.Computer Science