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

What Effect Does Spyware Have on Consumer Trust, and Will its Use Ever Be Acceptable?

Trust literature has been thoroughly developed in the field of Information Systems. However, recent innovations in broadband networks and the growing popularity of the Internet has brought rise to software called spyware - a program that employs a user\u27s Internet connection in the background without the user\u27s knowledge or explicit permission. This study attempts to analyze spyware and explore the nature of its effect on consumer trust. Additionally, the research examines what controls, if any may make the use of spyware acceptable to the consumer

Technoconsen(t)sus

This Article proposes to ease doctrinal noise in consent through creating an objective “reasonable digital consumer” standard based on empirical testing of real consumers. In a manner similar to the way in which courts assess actual consumer confusion in trademark law, digital user agreements can be tested for legal usability. Specifically, a particular digital agreement would be deemed to withstand an unconscionability challenge only to the extent that a drafter can demonstrate a “reasonable digital consumer” is capable of meaningfully understanding its terms and presentation. Part I of this Article introduces the challenges computer code presents to consent in the intellectual property space using the example of security-invasive DRM. It briefly describes DRM as a common business strategy for preemptively enforcing intellectual property rights. It then explains the negative consequences of this strategy for the information security of businesses, governments, and consumers. One of these negative consequences is industry confusion regarding the ethical norms of acceptable technology business conduct. Part II examines legal code and consent, placing the norm confusion described in Part I in legal context. This section describes the strain that the emergence of security-invasive DRM has placed on copyright law, computer intrusion law, and contract law in the United States. This tension forces us to come to terms with the preexisting problems of contractual consent and form contracts in a digital context. Current doctrinal construction of digital consent has analyzed user agreements only on grounds related to procedural unconscionability. This approach is flawed as a matter of contract doctrine: procedural and substantive unconscionability must be analyzed simultaneously under either Williston’s or Corbin’s standard of unconscionability. Either of these two approaches would correctly assess as unconscionable many current user agreements. Finally, Part III discusses the organizational code emerging at the intersection of computer code and legal code in digital contracting. It posits one possible legal approach to reconstructing meaningful consent in digital contracts in order to solve the problems of unconscionability discussed in Part II—generating an empirical objective “reasonable digital consumer” standard by looking to trademark law. Trademark case law offers well-established methods for determining whether a “reasonable” consumer is confused by a particular trademark or practice; these cases employ empirical testing by experts using real consumers. Importing this “legal usability testing” into digital contracting would benefit both users and content owners through creating predictability of legal outcome. Similarly, a reasonable digital consumer standard leverages the naturally occurring “hubs” of understanding that both courts and content owners seek to generate through form contracts. The proposed method strikes a successful balance between customization and standardization by using the real understandings of users. It also allows for evolution of these understandings over time as users’ familiarity with technology, and technology itself, advances

Spyware: The Ghost in the Machine

Computer users face a new and growing threat to security and privacy. This threat is not in the form of direct attacks by viruses or hackers, but rather by indirect infiltration in the form of monitoring programs surreptitiously installed on computers. These monitoring applications are called spyware, and serve to record and transmit a user\u27s computer uses and behaviors to third parties. Frequently used by marketers to harvest customer data for segmentation and targeting purposes, spyware can serve to direct targeted advertising to user\u27s computers. Spyware is often legally used since installations can be authorized as part of the licensed clickwrap agreement that users agree to when downloading free utility and file sharing programs from the Internet. In some cases, spyware is installed as part of legitimate computer applications provided by business to their customers, to provide updating and communicative functionality to application users. It appears that the ability to monitor remotely and communicate with computers is an opportunity attractive enough to attract the attention of third parties with non-legal intentions. This article focuses on the roles and functions of spyware, its use in both legitimate and non-legitimate ways, and a range of preventions and protections for avoiding and removing spyware that has been installed on end user computers

The Pegasus spyware scandal: a critical review of Citizen Lab's "CatalanGate"

This document dissects the report “CatalanGate: Extensive Mercenary Spyware Operation against Catalans Using Pegasus and Candiru”, published on 18 April 2022, by Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, and reveals a series of serious methodological and ethical issues that severely undermine its value as evidentiary basis for parliamentary committees and court trials. This critical review shows that Citizen Lab’s research design, fieldwork, and reporting of findings in the “CatalanGate” report clash with commonly accepted norms of academic research conduct and integrity. The variety and gravity of the pitfalls discovered suggest that Citizen Lab and the political organisations that collaborated with them in the elaboration of the report may have tried to purposefully induce a strong political bias to shape public opinion and achieve strong media impact. This critical review recommends the University of Toronto to launch an independent investigation on this report and to retract its publication. The CatalanGate report cannot be considered a rigorous academic work. It breaches most academic research conventions and does not respect the protocols and principles of digital forensic investigation. It appears to have been designed and conducted with the purpose of becoming a political instrument for Catalan nationalists, feeding evidence for lawsuits that both Apple and secessionist parties were planning, and attempting to justify ex-post the nullity of several trials that had taken place after the unilateral secession attempt in October 2017 —based on the pretended illegal monitoring of lawyers by the Spanish authorities at the time these trials took place—. As such, it could be considered as a key element in a disinformation campaign. It is beyond the scope of this review to assess whether Spain spied —legally or illegally— on some of the participants in the investigation or if Pegasus was the spyware of choice. This review shows, however, that the CatalanGate report does not meet the minimal requisites to be used as evidentiary basis for either legal procedures or parliamentary committees of enquiry. An independent investigation for research misconduct is expected in cases as serious as this one. Any parliamentary committee or court of justice investigating CatalanGate should request independent forensic experts —without connections to Citizen Lab or Amnesty Tech— to reproduce the analyses and assess their validity and reliability. It is important to rule out false positives as well as to identify any potential alterations or fabrications of evidence, such as manufactured positive results, taking advantage of the absence of a chain of custody of evidence in this investigation. The lack of checks on the actions of internet security and privacy watchdogs, such as Citizen Lab, and their potential “capture” by Big Tech corporations and partisan political groups should be a source of concern for the European Union. Citizen Lab is right to demand public accountability and transparency from European Member states, but it is also important that they also adhere to these same principles and that accusations against governments do not drive attention away from responsibilities and challenges incurred by Big Tech corporations regarding internet security

Because privacy: defining and legitimating privacy in ios development

Privacy is a critical challenge for the mobile application ecosystem. US policy approaches to mobile data protection rely on privacy by design: approaches that encourage developers to proactively implement privacy features to protect sensitive data. But we know little about how application developers define privacy, how they decide to implement privacy features, and what might motivate them to consider privacy as a primary design value. This project identifies these factors by investigating the discussion of privacy as a professional practice within a community of mobile application developers. Analyzing posts on an iOS forum reveals that privacy is a frequent topic of conversation in this community. This paper describes how iOS developers define and legitimate privacy, and reveals a challenge: iOS developers rely heavily on a definition of privacy provided by Apple which does not reflect current empirical or theoretical understandings of how users understand privacy. Understanding this challenge can help us shape better guidelines for privacy by design, and broach challenges to the widespread adoption of privacy by design principles