Customer Loyalty Programs and Privacy Concerns

In recent years, loyalty programs have been established allowing the creation of detailed consumer profiles by collecting and processing purchase information. Collecting this information, however, raises privacy concerns of customers. In this work, we provide the results of an empirical study which reveal that privacy concerns have an impact on the probability of participating in loyalty programs. We identify a privacy-sensitive segment of customers using demographic and psychographic data that, in principle, would participate in a loyalty program, however, refrains from doing so because of privacy concerns. Moreover, we found that people participating in customer loyalty programs are more concerned about their privacy than non-participants, which is an interesting though counterintuitive result

The neurovascular unit as a selective barrier to polymorphonuclear granulocyte (PMN) infiltration into the brain after ischemic injury

The migration of polymorphonuclear granulocytes (PMN) into the brain parenchyma and release of their abundant proteases are considered the main causes of neuronal cell death and reperfusion injury following ischemia. Yet, therapies targeting PMN egress have been largely ineffective. To address this discrepancy we investigated the temporo-spatial localization of PMNs early after transient ischemia in a murine transient middle cerebral artery occlusion (tMCAO) model and human stroke specimens. Using specific markers that distinguish PMN (Ly6G) from monocytes/macrophages (Ly6C) and that define the cellular and basement membrane boundaries of the neurovascular unit (NVU), histology and confocal microscopy revealed that virtually no PMNs entered the infarcted CNS parenchyma. Regardless of tMCAO duration, PMNs were mainly restricted to luminal surfaces or perivascular spaces of cerebral vessels. Vascular PMN accumulation showed no spatial correlation with increased vessel permeability, enhanced expression of endothelial cell adhesion molecules, platelet aggregation or release of neutrophil extracellular traps. Live cell imaging studies confirmed that oxygen and glucose deprivation followed by reoxygenation fail to induce PMN migration across a brain endothelial monolayer under flow conditions in vitro. The absence of PMN infiltration in infarcted brain tissues was corroborated in 25 human stroke specimens collected at early time points after infarction. Our observations identify the NVU rather than the brain parenchyma as the site of PMN action after CNS ischemia and suggest reappraisal of targets for therapies to reduce reperfusion injury after strok

Kulturen des Entscheidens

Der Band thematisiert Entscheiden als eine soziale Praxis, die keineswegs selbstverständlich sondern in hohem Maße voraussetzungsvoll ist und die mit unterschiedlichen Zumutungen einhergeht. Entscheiden nimmt je nach sozialen Umständen ganz unterschiedliche Formen an und unterliegt demnach dem historischen Wandel. Die Beiträge des Bandes gehen anhand ausgewählter Fallbeispiele, die vom mittelalterlichen Europa bis hin zum gegenwärtigen Indien reichen, unterschiedlichen Aspekten von Kulturen des Entscheidens nach. Sie nehmen Narrative und Praktiken des Entscheidens ebenso in den Blick wie den Einsatz von Ressourcen in Prozessen des Entscheidens und diskutieren Ansätze, Entscheiden in einer geistes- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Perspektive zu analysieren. Der Band zeigt so die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten auf, wie Entscheiden untersucht werden kann, wenn dieses als eine historisch wandelbare soziale Praxis und als kulturell diverses Phänomen begriffen wird

Potential of Core-Collapse Supernova Neutrino Detection at JUNO

JUNO is an underground neutrino observatory under construction in Jiangmen, China. It uses 20kton liquid scintillator as target, which enables it to detect supernova burst neutrinos of a large statistics for the next galactic core-collapse supernova (CCSN) and also pre-supernova neutrinos from the nearby CCSN progenitors. All flavors of supernova burst neutrinos can be detected by JUNO via several interaction channels, including inverse beta decay, elastic scattering on electron and proton, interactions on C12 nuclei, etc. This retains the possibility for JUNO to reconstruct the energy spectra of supernova burst neutrinos of all flavors. The real time monitoring systems based on FPGA and DAQ are under development in JUNO, which allow prompt alert and trigger-less data acquisition of CCSN events. The alert performances of both monitoring systems have been thoroughly studied using simulations. Moreover, once a CCSN is tagged, the system can give fast characterizations, such as directionality and light curve

Detection of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background with JUNO

As an underground multi-purpose neutrino detector with 20 kton liquid scintillator, Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is competitive with and complementary to the water-Cherenkov detectors on the search for the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB). Typical supernova models predict 2-4 events per year within the optimal observation window in the JUNO detector. The dominant background is from the neutral-current (NC) interaction of atmospheric neutrinos with 12C nuclei, which surpasses the DSNB by more than one order of magnitude. We evaluated the systematic uncertainty of NC background from the spread of a variety of data-driven models and further developed a method to determine NC background within 15\% with {\it{in}} {\it{situ}} measurements after ten years of running. Besides, the NC-like backgrounds can be effectively suppressed by the intrinsic pulse-shape discrimination (PSD) capabilities of liquid scintillators. In this talk, I will present in detail the improvements on NC background uncertainty evaluation, PSD discriminator development, and finally, the potential of DSNB sensitivity in JUNO

Methods to Improve Privacy and Loyalty in Online Commerce

Online customers are hardly able to verify the claims of online vendors to respect and protect their privacy, especially when it comes to the collection of personal data and its use. However, the collection itself is not the primary problem — it is the linkage of the data to a person's real-world identity. This linkage is what allows vendors to create profiles of customers with or without the customers' consent. The goal of this work was to develop methods that can do without any personal data or allow customers to prevent linkage of their personal data without their explicit consent. In this work, we have developed an abstract model which allows to analyse the relationship between a customer and a vendor with respect to privacy. This model allows us to determine if the personal data, produced by the common transactions of customers and vendors, can be decoupled from the customer's identity. The model introduces phases as a means to further divide transactions into smaller semantic units. Previous work in this area only considered unlinkability with respect to transactions, while in this work, we go one step further and also consider unlinkability of phases, improving customer privacy even more. The other contributions of this work can be seen as use cases of the model. They deal with phases of transactions that permit deep insights into the private life of customers and hence, are of primary concern when it comes to privacy and profiling. The search phase, where customers browse vendors' catalogues, is one of them. In this phase, vendors can easily monitor and evaluate preferences and dislikes of customers without customers being aware of it. To prevent such monitoring, we have proposed an architecture that aims to decouple the search phase from the remainder of its transaction, preventing vendors from linking search data to customer identities. Another important phase for profiling comes into play with loyalty and incentive systems. It is well-known that the former is a means to retain customers but often also to monitor the behaviour of customers, which in turn raises privacy concerns. In this work, we have developed a loyalty system that supports customer retention, protects the privacy of customers (as it can be used anonymously), and respects the security demands of vendors. The system was especially developed for online commerce and is the first one that enforces the privacy of customers by technical rather than by organisational means. Another kind of customer retention system is a so called multi-coupon system, which —on a technical level— can be regarded as a kind of limited-show credential. The system proposed here allows customers to anonymously prove to vendors that the multi-coupon in their possession is valid and contains at least one unspent coupon. In addition, the redemption protocol guarantees that in each run exactly one of the unspent coupons from the multi-coupon is devalued. Finally, our system allows limited-show credentials to be spent in an anonymous fashion, i.e., without allowing linkability between different showings

Web-Tracking-Report 2014

Durch die Enthüllungen von Edward Snowden ist öffentlich geworden, in welchem Umfang Geheimdienste Verbraucher haben. Doch die heimliche Verfolgung von Verbrauchern im Internet ist nicht nur den Geheimdiensten vorbehalten: Viele Unternehmen sammeln möglichst viele Daten über Verbraucher. Sie fördern den Rohstoff Daten heute in großem Stil durch Web-Tracking. Dieser Report stellt verschiedene Aspekte des Themas Web-Tracking dar