The Do Not Track Me Online laws: creating a ceiling when the sky's the limit and we are halfway to heaven

This comment examines a recent Wall Street Journal article discussing proposed plans of MasterCard or VISA to provide customers with targeted ads as they surf the Web using information attained by tracking customer purchases in brick-and-mortar stores. Since the online behavioral advertising industry is largely self-regulated, this raises concerns as to whether the companies amassing this information are giving customers adequate disclosure of their collection and dissemination practices and an opportunity to give sufficient informed consent. The lack of legislation specific to these practices, or regulatory oversight, has paved the way for organizations to race to discover increasingly intrusive ways of compiling consumer information. Finding a balance between an individual's right to privacy and commercial access to personal information represents the fundamental regulatory issue that needs to be resolved. The Do Not Track laws proposed by Representative Jackie Speier of California in February of 2011 represent a good start to creating this balance. This comment will examine the specific plans proposed by VISA and MasterCard, discuss the current regulatory status of online behavioral advertising, and conclude by arguing that the proposed Do Not Track laws provide the appropriate balance between consumer privacy protection and marketing needs.     

E-banking: challenges and opportunities in the Greek banking sector

Internet technologies have a great potential for changing fundamentally the banks and the banking industry. The opportunities, which the e-banking services and technologies offer to the banking sector in order to fulfil existing customer needs and to attract new prospective customers, are the driving forces for banks in order to design, develop and operate their own e-banking systems. This paper examines the challenges and opportunities of e-banking for the Greek banking sector, during the e-commerce era, and also presents the results of a survey of banking executives working at banks offering e-banking services. The main findings demonstrate that banks expand to e-banking services in order to remain competitive, to keep track with technological developments and to benefit from the lower cost of e-banking transactions. The major problems they face are the low response rate from customers and the implementation of security and data protection mechanisms. The relatively low Internet usage, the non-familiarity with technologically advanced devices and problems regarding security and privacy are the main factors that have a negative influence on the adoption of e-banking services by customers in Greece.     

Perceptions of Customer Service,Information Privacy,and Product Quality From Semiotic Design Features in an Online Web Store

The rise of the World Wide Web for electronic commerce has led to a proliferation of companies selling products online. The global nature of the Internet allows customers to browse the products of companies with which they are wholly unfamiliar. However, concerns about customer service, information privacy, and product quality discourage purchasing from unknown companies. In this article, the effects of semiotic Web design features on expectations of these performance criteria in a purchase situation are investigated. Specifically, the presence and prominence of links to customer service and a site privacy policy, and the existence of product ratings and customer testimonials, were tested to measure their effects on customer perceptions and expectations. Results indicate that some design features have a strong semiotic effect on customer expectations. Prominent links to customer service and a site privacy policy significantly increased expectations of customer service and privacy protection. The presence of product ratings increased perceptions of product quality. All 3 design features led to increased likelihood of purchase. Furthermore, participants were not aware of these effects and reported not considering product ratings in their decisions. Implications of these results on Web site design and consumer behavior are discussed.     

The upside of data privacy – delighting customers by implementing data privacy measures

The targeted analysis of customer data becomes increasingly important for data-driven business models. At the same time, the customers’ concerns regarding data privacy have to be addressed properly. Existing research mostly describes data privacy as a necessary evil for compliance and risk management and does not propose specific data privacy measures which address the customers’ concerns. We therefore aim to shed light on the upside of data privacy. In this paper, we derive specific measures to deal with customers’ data privacy concerns based on academic literature, legislative texts, corporate privacy statements, and expert interviews. Next, we leverage the Kano model and data from two internet-based surveys to analyze the measures’ evaluation by customers. From a customer perspective, the implementation of the majority of measures is obligatory as those measures are considered as basic needs of must-be quality. However, delighting measures of attractive quality do exist and have the potential to create a competitive advantage. In this, we find some variation across different industries suggesting that corporations aiming to improve customer satisfaction by superior privacy protection should elicit the demands of their specific target customers.     

How entrepreneurial practices balance art and business: Insights into creative entrepreneurship in the European film industry

Relying on the literature on tensions and contradictions and the theory of practice, coupled with the literature on creative industries, this study uncovers how creative entrepreneurs balance the tension between art and business and respond to other challenges of creative entrepreneurship. The multiple case studies method is adopted by examining founders, cofounders and main employees of European film production companies. We reveal the perception of creative entrepreneurs towards the relationship between art and business. We explore different organizational and industry-level challenges experienced by creative entrepreneurs and uncover the organizational practices they adopt to deal with the identified challenges. The research contributes to the phenomenon of creative entrepreneurship by introducing the practice perspective, to the literature on paradox and contradiction by exploring the micro-foundations of tensions and paradox responses in high-intensity situations and to practice-based studies by investigating a domain-specific practice theory and highlighting the agency of creative entrepreneurs in adapting practices necessary to deal with conflicting demands of creative entrepreneurship.     

The role of perceived information practices on consumers’ intention to authorise secondary use of personal data

We are living in an era where data lead to opportunities, especially customer data. According to privacy laws, however, without customers’ authorisation, organisations face many limitations in using identifiable information for secondary purposes. Consequently, organisations are missing out on many potential business opportunities to capitalise on customer data. Privacy concerns have become the biggest roadblock to gain customer consent because of the potential risks associated with the use of personal information. This situation underscores the importance of devising effective information practices and strategies in dealing with the use of customer data. Privacy literature suggests that information practices may influence individuals’ intentions to participate in situations requiring the collection and use of personal data. Yet, existing research has not systematically analysed the role of these strategies in influencing intention. Also, previous studies focus primarily on the disclosure of personal data. Issues surrounding ‘authorisation of personal data for secondary use’ remain unexplored. The purpose of our study is to examine the role of information practices on intention to authorise secondary use of personal data. The results show that privacy concerns and trusting beliefs significantly affect individual perceptions of information practices. Perception of information practices in turn exerts significant effect on intention to authorise secondary use of personal data. Both theoretical and managerial implications of the results are discussed.     

医院客户关系管理系统体系结构设计

HCRM是医院客户关系管理系统的简称。其主要目的是通过建立HCRM系统,想方设法为客户提供全方位的、满意的服务,以维持和保留现有客户,吸引潜在客户,去提高医院的核心竞争力。该文根据客户关系管理的管理理念和机制,结合医院管理的实际情况,对医院客户关系管理(HCRM)软件的需求分析、数据字典的准备等进行深入细致的研究。将统一建模语言(UML)应用于系统的开发设计中,采用先进的开发工具,数据交换为基于网络的C/S结构,自顶向下设计,考虑用户的特定需求,采用面向对象的方法设计用户界面,并提出相应的解决方案。     

Resuscitating privacy-preserving mobile payment with customer in complete control

Credit/debit card payment transactions do not protect the privacy of the customer. Once the card is handed over to the merchant for payment processing, customers are “no longer in control” on how their card details and money are handled. This leads to card fraud, identity theft, and customer profiling. Therefore, for those customers who value their privacy and security of their payment transactions, this paper proposes a choice—an alternate mobile payment model called “Pre-Paid Mobile HTTPS-based Payment model”. In our proposed payment model, the customer obtains the merchant’s bank account information and then instructs his/her bank to transfer the money to the merchant’s bank account. We utilize near field communication (NFC) protocol to obtain the merchant’s bank account information into the customer’s NFC-enabled smartphone. We also use partially blind signature scheme to hide the customers’ identity from the bank. As a result, our payment model provides the customer with complete control on his/her payments and privacy protection from both the bank and the merchant. We emulated our proposed mobile payment model using Android SDK 2.1 platform and analyzed its execution time.     

从脸书用户个人信息泄露事件谈我国社交媒体用户隐私保护

The rapid development of information technology has promoted the popularization of social media applications. Social me- dia has become a platform for users to search for real-time information and communicate and interact. Privacy protection is an im- portant symbol of the progress of human modern civilization. While enjoying the benefits brought by social media, human rights al- so face unprecedented challenges. Therefore, the protection of privacy highlights its importance. This paper analyzes the information leakage of Facebook users in order to discover the various risks faced by the privacy protection of social media users. Then it re- views the user privacy protection measures of major social media platforms at home and abroad. Finally, it is recommended that the government level should speed up the improvement of the social media platform user privacy supervision system, the enterprise lev- el should strengthen the implementation of the social media platform user privacy protection subject responsibility, and the user must improve personal information security literacy and protect personal information and privacy together.     

Determination and exchange of supply information for co-operation in complex production networks

Today's manufacturing industry is characterised by strong interdependencies between companies operating in globally distributed production networks. The operation of such value-added chains has been enabled by recent developments in information and communication technologies (ICT) and computer networking. To gain competitive advantages and efficiency improvements such as reduced inventory and higher delivery reliability, companies are introducing information exchange systems that communicate demand to suppliers and production progress information to customers in the network. This article proposes a system that supports co-operation in complex production networks by enabling companies to determine and exchange supply information with their customers. The requirements for such a system are analysed and it is embedded in a framework of supply chain management business processes. The system facilitates the determination and exchange of meaningful, reliable and up-to-date order status information from the supplier to the customer. Based on comparing the progress of an internal production order with a pre-defined milestone model for each product, the status of the customer order is determined and—in case of lateness—communicated to the customer together with an early warning. To demonstrate the developed supply information concepts and processes, the business process is implemented as a pilot system and evaluated by the user companies participating in the 5th Framework IST project Co-OPERATE.     

电子商务客户流失的DBN预测模型研究

在电子商务迅速发展,企业快速抢占市场的背景下,客户成为企业竞争的核心因素。现有相关研究多致力于采用全数据输入模式解析客户流失现象,不同类型客户造成的差异性还有待进一步探讨。鉴于传统RFM模型不能精确解释电子商务客户流失原因,该研究将客户分为活跃与非活跃两个集群,提出一种优化的RFM理论模型与深度信念网络实证模型对电子商务客户流失进行预测。结果表明,不同类型客户流失因素的影响强度不同。对活跃用户而言,客户购买总金额是影响客户流失的主要因素;对非活跃用户而言,客户进入店铺的时间越长越可能留住客户。通过剖析非活跃用户不流失和活跃用户流失的原因,可帮助企业制定有效的客户管理策略,以最大程度地吸引潜在客户及保留现有客户,获取最多的市场利益。     

Product recommendation with latent review topics

Online customer reviews complement information from product and service providers. While the latter is directly from the source of the product and/or service, the former is generally from users of these products and/or services. Clearly, these two information sets are generated from different perspectives with possibly different sets of intentions. For a prospective customer, both these perspectives together provide a complementary set of information and support their purchase decisions. Given the different perspective and incentive structure, the information from these two source sets tends to be necessarily biased, clearly with the high probability of negative information omission from that provided by the product/service providers. Moreover, customers oftentimes face information overload during their attempts at deciphering existing online customer reviews. We attempt to alleviate this through mining hidden information in online customer reviews. We use a variant of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model and clustering to generate equivalent options that the customer could then use in their purchase decisions. We illustrate this using online hotel review data.     

Customers perspectives on adoption of cloud computing in banking sector

The advent of cloud computing has transformed the role of the Internet in many businesses and organizations. Currently, banks are increasingly adopting cloud technologies to fulfil their varied purposes and to create a flexible and agile banking environment that can quickly respond to new business needs. However, past studies tend to focus more on the adoption issues of cloud computing from the organizational perspective with little attention paid on the users’ view of these cloud-based services. Therefore, this paper attempts to investigate the factors influencing cloud computing adoption in the banking sector from the customers’ perspective and to propose an adoption model for this purpose. The model is mainly developed based on the TAM-diffusion theory model (TAM-DTM) with the introduction of three new constructs namely trust, cost, and security and privacy. Questionnaires were randomly distributed to 162 bank customers in Malaysia. Survey data were analyzed using the partial least squares (PLS) method while SmartPLS was used to test the hypotheses and to validate the proposed model. The results suggest that trust, cost, and security and privacy can be successfully integrated within the TAM-TDM. The security and privacy constructs exhibited strong positive influence on perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and trust. The study concludes that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, cost, attitudes toward cloud and trust significantly influence users’ behavioral intention to adopt cloud computing. Thus, the finding of this study will enable banks to focus more on customer perspectives on cloud-based applications and identify their attitude towards their adoption.     

CONTROLLING THE THREAT TO PERSONAL PRIVACY Corporate Policies Must Be Created

Information technology makes it easier than ever to collect, store, and disseminate personal information, then use it to carry out business and political decisions. Federal legislation limits corporate and government manipulation of personal data, and private companies are finding that they must do the same or risk lawsuits from irate customers, clients, and rejected prospects. This article explores the concept of privacy, describes the major computer threats to personal privacy and the changing legal environment, and recommends how organizations can establish internal privacy codes for their own protection.     

Balance cues of online-offline channel integration: Considering the moderating role of customer's showrooming motivation

Although omni-channel retailers have made substantial investments in online-offline channel integration, they face the challenge of how to best present these valuable systems to retain customers. Based on cue congruence theory, this study examined the congruence and incongruence between perceived information integration and fulfillment integration on customer retention, and further considered the moderating role of showrooming motivation. Results showed that incongruence was negatively related to customer retention, whereas congruence had a nonlinear effect. Additionally, an asymmetrical incongruence effect was observed, and showrooming motivation was found to amplify the influence of congruence and incongruence. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Designing a Framework for Digital KYC Processes Built on Blockchain-Based Self-Sovereign Identity

Know your customer (KYC) processes place a great burden on banks, because they are costly, inefficient, and inconvenient for customers. While blockchain technology is often mentioned as a potential solution, it is not clear how to use the technology’s advantages without violating data protection regulations and customer privacy. We demonstrate how blockchain-based self-sovereign identity (SSI) can solve the challenges of KYC. We follow a rigorous design science research approach to create a framework that utilizes SSI in the KYC process, deriving nascent design principles that theorize on blockchain’s role for SSI.     

Investigating the Antecedents of Customer Behavioral Intentions Using the Service Acceptance Model

In highly competitive markets, enterprises provide various services to attract and retain customers. However, even though they are able provide higher‐quality services to customers, there are still many companies that are unable to gain benefits because customers do want these services. With the integration of the theory of planned behavior and quality‐value‐satisfaction‐behavioral intention model proposed by Cronin, Brandy, and Hult ( 2000 ), the service acceptance model, an extended model based on the characteristics of the service industry, is proposed in this work to investigate the effects of attitude, social pressure, perceived behavioral control, service quality, and service value on behavioral intention. The empirical results show that the perceived behavioral control of the high‐income sample group is not correlated with customer behavioral intentions, which differs from the results for the overall and low‐income sample groups. The customers’ own financial resources are thus of great importance in this context. Service quality has a significantly positive impact on perceived value and attitude. This suggests that good service quality will be conducive to increasing perceived value and strengthening customers’ positive attitudes toward a service, indirectly affecting the behavioral intention to purchase a service.     

A systematic methodology for privacy impact assessments: a design science approach

For companies that develop and operate IT applications that process the personal data of customers and employees, a major problem is protecting these data and preventing privacy breaches. Failure to adequately address this problem can result in considerable damage to the company’s reputation and finances, as well as negative effects for customers or employees (data subjects). To address this problem, we propose a methodology that systematically considers privacy issues by using a step-by-step privacy impact assessment (PIA). Existing PIA approaches cannot be applied easily because they are improperly structured or imprecise and lengthy. We argue that companies that employ our PIA can achieve ‘privacy-by-design’, which is widely heralded by data protection authorities. In fact, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) ratified the approach we present in this article for the technical field of RFID and published it as a guideline in November 2011. The contribution of the artefacts we created is twofold: First, we provide a formal problem representation structure for the analysis of privacy requirements. Second, we reduce the complexity of the privacy regulation landscape for practitioners who need to make privacy management decisions for their IT applications.     

Analysis of E-commerce innovation and impact: a hypercube model

Electronic commerce (E-commerce) innovating applications have posed novel, technical, organizational and commercial challenges. This study uses a hypercube model to investigate these innovative changes and focuses on their impacts on E-commerce stakeholders: providers, E-commerce companies, customers, and complementors. The results indicate that mobile commerce (M-commerce) differs substantially from Web-based commerce in some technological components, yet both share common business model. However, from Web-based to M-commerce, innovation is architectural for customers and E-commerce companies, but a radical change for complementors. From M-commerce to U-commerce, innovation is modular to customers, architectural to complementors and radical to E-commerce companies and providers. Thereafter, the critical impacts of E-commerce innovations on the stakeholders are identified.     

Do security and privacy policies in B2B and B2C e-commerce differ? A comparative study using content analysis

Security and privacy policies address consumer concerns related to security and privacy in e-commerce websites. As these policies represent only the vendor’s perspective, often there exists a mismatch between the stated and desired policy. Based on transaction cost theory, we speculate that business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce customers use their transaction cost savings in order to obtain varying levels of security and privacy. These differences are bound to be reflected in the security and privacy policies of e-commerce companies. Therefore, in this paper, we perform a comparative content analysis of the security and privacy policies in B2C and B2B e-commerce. Results show that B2B vendors are more concerned about security than their B2C counterparts, while B2C vendors are anxious about intimacy and restriction privacy. Our findings have important implications for e-commerce consumers and vendors as individual and corporate consumers have varying concerns while transacting online. Individual consumers are concerned about maintaining security and intimacy privacy, whereas corporate users are anxious about regulatory issues. Therefore, B2C vendors should incorporate stringent measures dedicated to confidentiality and protection of consumer data as well as enhance intimacy privacy in their security policies, while their B2B counterparts should focus on enhancing restriction privacy.