Using the Sayre Model to analyze Internet privacy

The Internet continues to evolve as a transportal of electronic commerce. It has penetrated into every facet of organizational life, from the ordering of commodity goods to providing a means to speed the recording and payment of federal income taxes. Internet usage continues to expand rapidly, surfacing issues in its wake that must be managed in order for it to ensure that it is viable as a long-term strategic tool for government and industry. To bridge the legal gap that has emerged as a result of the dynamic growth of the Internet, the United States Congress has acted to begin to address issues such as access to information and the unauthorized use of personal data. Though the issues themselves are not new, the amount of information and the rapidity of transfer of the information have been greatly expanded by the use of the Internet. This paper explores the relationship between the three dimensions (government, individual consumer needs and business as represented by industry groups) that are influencing the development of a legislated Internet privacy model

Competing in the Virtual World: E-Commerce Factors that affect the Property-Casualty Insurance Industry

Electronic commerce has exploded; its expansion projections are consistently understated. We explore the current state of the property-casualty insurance industry use of the Internet for electronic commerce, by analyzing the factors that affect the expansion and use of electronic commerce in the property-casualty insurance industry. The insurance industry has embraced the use of technology to expand its market and to provide better customer service. Competition within the United States has expanded recently to include companies in Europe and Asia. A survey of property-casualty insurance company web sites was performed to determine what types of services and features are currently offered through the Internet. Thirty-six web sites were sampled and the results showed that while no insurance company currently offers a fully electronic policy purchase process, there are a variety of services that are provided for through their web sites. The more common web based features include the ability to locate an agent, the ability to find information about how to report a claim, and the ability request a quote. Use of the Internet as a tool for electronic commerce within the insurance industry has not yet been fully utilized

Running Probabilistic Programs Backwards

Many probabilistic programming languages allow programs to be run under constraints in order to carry out Bayesian inference. Running programs under constraints could enable other uses such as rare event simulation and probabilistic verification---except that all such probabilistic languages are necessarily limited because they are defined or implemented in terms of an impoverished theory of probability. Measure-theoretic probability provides a more general foundation, but its generality makes finding computational content difficult. We develop a measure-theoretic semantics for a first-order probabilistic language with recursion, which interprets programs as functions that compute preimages. Preimage functions are generally uncomputable, so we derive an abstract semantics. We implement the abstract semantics and use the implementation to carry out Bayesian inference, stochastic ray tracing (a rare event simulation), and probabilistic verification of floating-point error bounds.Comment: 26 pages, ESOP 2015 (to appear

E-Commerce Adoption in the Insurance Industry

While other industries within the financial sector have vigorously embraced the Internet to obtain sustainable competitive advantage, the insurance industry has been slow to fully adopt e-commerce. This article examines the barriers as well as the success factors involved in making the transition to a Web-enabled insurance model. Emerging standards and technologies that will make possible the next generation of e-commerce in the insurance industry are discussed and a proposed research agenda is presented