The ethicality of using fear for social advertising

While a substantial body of literature has examined the effect of fear appeals in advertising, few, if any, studies have looked into the ethicality of using such threatening messages, particularly for socially desirable outcomes. In this paper, a review of the different theories of ethics leads to the development of an empirical study where the effects of using both physically and socially threatening messages to encourage juveniles to develop anti-smoking behavioural intentions were tested. Using the data collected from a convenience sample of about 250 undergraduates from the University of Adelaide, the results show that fear appeals may indeed be perceived as unethical, even when used for socially desirable purposes. Moreover, social threats were perceived as more unethical and generated less fear than physical threat, suggesting that their use may be counter productive with this type of population. Finally, ethicality did not appear to relate necessarily to change in behavioural intentions. Damien Arthur & Pascale Queste

Privacy-Enhanced Web Personalization

Abstract. Consumer studies demonstrate that online users value personalized content. At the same time, providing personalization on websites seems quite profitable for web vendors. This win-win situation is however marred by privacy concerns since personalizing people's interaction entails gathering considerable amounts of data about them. As numerous recent surveys have consistently demonstrated, computer users are very concerned about their privacy on the Internet. Moreover, the collection of personal data is also subject to legal regulations in many countries and states. Both user concerns and privacy regulations impact frequently used personalization methods. This article analyzes the tension between personalization and privacy, and presents approaches to reconcile the both. It has been tacitly acknowledged for many years that personalized interaction and user modeling have significant privacy implications, due to the fact that large amounts of personal information about users needs to be collected to perform personalization. Fo