Securing online privacy: An empirical test on Internet scam victimization,online privacy concerns,and privacy protection behaviors

The current study identified the antecedents of being an Internet scam victim and how it impacts online privacy concerns and privacy protection behaviors. Structural equation modeling on data from a survey of 11,534 Internet users revealed that one indicator of weak self-control (i.e., willingness of risky investments) and two indicators of routine Internet activities (i.e., online shopping and opening emails from unknown sources) positively predicted being an Internet scam victim. Subsequently, being an Internet scam victim predicted increased online privacy concerns, which, in turn, predicted elevated privacy protection behaviors. Moreover, we found that being an Internet scam victim mediated the effects of routine Internet activities on privacy protection behaviors and that online privacy concerns mediated the effect of being an Internet scam on privacy protection behaviors. Unlike most Internet privacy studies using protection motivation theory only, the current study contributes to the understanding of the Internet scam victimization by incorporating three new theories—extended parallel process model, self-control theory, and routine activity theory. The research findings provided valuable implications for theory and practice related to Internet scam processes and prevention.     

Affect,cognition and reward: Predictors of privacy protection online

This article examined the interplay between cognition and affect in Internet uses for privacy control. A survey of a national sample was conducted to empirically test the relationship between affective concern for and cognitive knowledge of information privacy online. We also tested for the interactive role of reward-seeking as a moderator among these relationships. Findings revealed that concern did not directly play a meaningful role in guiding users’ protective behavior, whereas knowledge was found significant in moderating the role of concern. The interactive role of reward-seeking seems particularly salient in shaping the structure of the relationships. These findings suggest that the intersections between knowledge, reward, and concern can play out differently, depending on the levels of each. Policy implications in relation to users’ cognitive, affective, and reward-seeking rationalities are offered, and future research considerations are discussed.     

An extension of Trust and TAM model with TPB in the initial adoption of on-line tax: An empirical study

While on-line tax is considered as a special type of e-service, the adoption rate of this service in Taiwan is still relatively low. The initial adoption of on-line tax is the important driving force to further influence the use and continued use of this service. The model of Trust and technology acceptance model (TAM) in Gefen et al. (2003a, MIS Quarterly 27(1), 51–90) has been well studied in on-line shopping and showed that understanding both the Internet technology and trust issue is important in determining behavioral intention to use. Besides, the diffusion of on-line tax could also be influenced by the potential antecedents such as individuals, organizational members, and social system while the issue for innovative technology is well discussed in Rogers (1995, The Diffusion of Innovation, fourth ed. Free Press, New York). Theory of planned behavior (TPB) is the model widely used to discuss the effect of these antecedents in behavioral intention. An extension of Trust and TAM model with TPB would be in more comprehensive manner to understand behavioral intention to use on-line tax. Furthermore, a large sample survey is used to empirically examine this framework.     

Internet social network communities: Risk taking,trust, and privacy concerns

Individuals communicate and form relationships through Internet social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace. We study risk taking, trust, and privacy concerns with regard to social networking websites among 205 college students using both reliable scales and behavior. Individuals with profiles on social networking websites have greater risk taking attitudes than those who do not; greater risk taking attitudes exist among men than women. Facebook has a greater sense of trust than MySpace. General privacy concerns and identity information disclosure concerns are of greater concern to women than men. Greater percentages of men than women display their phone numbers and home addresses on social networking websites. Social networking websites should inform potential users that risk taking and privacy concerns are potentially relevant and important concerns before individuals sign-up and create social networking websites.     

Trustworthiness in electronic commerce: the role of privacy, security, and site attributes

While the growth of business-to-consumer electronic commerce seems phenomenal in recent years, several studies suggest that a large number of individuals using the Internet have serious privacy concerns, and that winning public trust is the primary hurdle to continued growth in e-commerce. This research investigated the relative importance, when purchasing goods and services over the Web, of four common trust indices (i.e. (1) third party privacy seals, (2) privacy statements, (3) third party security seals, and (4) security features). The results indicate consumers valued security features significantly more than the three other trust indices. We also investigated the relationship between these trust indices and the consumer's perceptions of a marketer's trustworthiness. The findings indicate that consumers' ratings of trustworthiness of Web merchants did not parallel experts' evaluation of sites' use of the trust indices. This study also examined the extent to which consumers are willing to provide private information to electronic and land merchants. The results revealed that when making the decision to provide private information, consumers rely on their perceptions of trustworthiness irrespective of whether the merchant is electronic only or land and electronic. Finally, we investigated the relative importance of three types of Web attributes: security, privacy and pleasure features (convenience, ease of use, cosmetics). Privacy and security features were of lesser importance than pleasure features when considering consumers' intention to purchase. A discussion of the implications of these results and an agenda for future research are provided.     

Fingerprint template protection with minutiae-based bit-string for security and privacy preserving

Recently, biometric template protection has received great attention from the research community due to the security and privacy concerns for biometric template. Although a number of biometric template protection methods have been reported, it is still a challenging task to devise a scheme which satisfies all of the four template protection criteria namely diversity, revocability, non-invertibility and performance. In this paper, a method is proposed to generate a revocable fingerprint template in terms of bit-string from a set of minutiae points via a polar grid based 3-tuple quantization technique. Two merits of the proposed method are outlined, namely alignment-free and performance. Four publicly available benchmark datasets: FVC2002 DB1, DB2 and FVC2004 DB1, DB2 are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Besides, the diversity, revocability, non-invertibility criteria are also analyzed.     

Understanding the privacy behavior of adolescents on Facebook: The role of peers,popularity and trust

We study whether peer influence processes, popularity and trust predict privacy settings on Facebook. We use large-scale survey data from 3434 Dutch adolescents combined with observed privacy behavior on Facebook. The findings show that peer influence processes play a role and that adolescents imitate the privacy settings of their peers in the classroom. Such imitation processes are particularly pronounced for highly connected classrooms. The results show that more popular adolescents in the classroom are more likely to publicly display their Facebook profiles. Furthermore, we find that low-trust groups (ethnic minorities, lower educated and younger adolescents, and girls) more frequently opt for private Facebook profiles.     

Trust in software outsourcing relationships: An empirical investigation of Indian software companies

This paper investigates trust in software outsourcing relationships. The study is based on an empirical investigation of eighteen high maturity software vendor companies based in India. Our analysis of the literature suggests that trust has received a lot of attention in all kinds of business relationships. This includes inter-company relationships, whether cooperative ventures or subcontracting relationships, and relationship among different parts of a single company. However, trust has been relatively under-explored in software outsourcing relationships. In this paper, we present a detailed empirical investigation of trust in commercial software outsourcing relationships. The investigation presents what vendor companies perceive about getting trust from client companies in outsourcing relationships. We present the results in two parts—(1) achieving trust initially in outsourcing relationships and (2) maintaining trust in ongoing outsourcing relationships. Our findings confirm that the critical factors to achieving trust initially in an outsourcing relationship include previous clients' reference and experience of vendor in outsourcing engagements. Critical factors identified for maintaining trust in an established outsourcing relationship include transparency, demonstrability, honesty, process followed and commitment. Our findings also suggest that trust is considered to be very fragile in outsourcing relationships.     

An analysis of privacy signals on the World Wide Web: Past, present and future

Electronic commerce is now an established, vital part of the world economy. However, this economic sector is currently endangered by consumers’ well-founded concern for the privacy of their information. Recent surveys indicate that this concern is beginning to alter consumers’ spending habits. The World Wide Web Consortium is well aware of these concerns, and has produced the Platform for Privacy Preferences Protocol as a mechanism to help consumers protect their online privacy. This mechanism relies on the use of machine-readable privacy policies, posted on a website, and interpreted by a client-side browser extension. However, recent surveys indicate that adoption of this technology is stagnating on the server side, and work on an updated version of the Platform has been halted. We use signaling theory as a framework to model the likely future evolution of the Platform, in an effort to gauge whether it will flourish or wither as a technology. We find that signaling theory predicts the collapse of the Platform for Privacy Preferences Protocol. However, we also find theoretical and empirical grounds to predict that government intervention can drive adoption of the Platform on the server side, which may in turn bootstrap user adoption of this technology.     

When changing the look of privacy policies affects user trust: An experimental study

The majority of Internet users do not read privacy policies because of their lengthy verbose format, although they are still the main source of information for users about how their data are collected and used. Consequently, as shown by many studies, users do not trust online services with respect to the use of their private data. Furthermore, they find it unfair that their data are used to generate revenue by online services without their knowledge or without their benefit from this.In this paper, we take as main assumption that the control of their private data and also caring about their interests would restore the trust of users. Based on an empirical model, we conducted an experimental comparative study of user trust by offering to two groups of participants the possibility to adhere to a service with a privacy policy presented in one of two different formats: the first, a conventional privacy policy and the second, designed according to the privacy policy model studied in this paper.We collected, through a survey, 717 responses from participants. The results show that allowing personalization and management in privacy policies affects user trust and makes online services appear more trustworthy to their users.     

An extended attribute based access control model with trust and privacy: Application to a collaborative crisis management system

Many efforts in the area of computer security have been drawn to attribute-based access control (ABAC). Compared to other adopted models, ABAC provides more granularity, scalability, and flexibility. This makes it a valuable access control system candidate for securing platforms and environments used for coordination and cooperation among organizations and communities, especially over open networks such as the Internet. On the other hand, the basic ABAC model lacks provisions for context, trust and privacy issues, all of which are becoming increasingly critical, particularly in high performance distributed collaboration environments. This paper presents an extended access control model based on attributes associated with objects and subjects. It incorporates trust and privacy issues in order to make access control decisions sensitive to the cross-organizational collaboration context. Several aspects of the proposed model are implemented and illustrated by a case study that shows realistic ABAC policies in the domain of distributed multiple organizations crisis management systems. Furthermore, the paper shows a collaborative graphical tool that enables the actors in the emergency management system to make better decisions. The prototype shows how it guarantees the privacy of object’s attributes, taking into account the trust of the subjects. This tool incorporates a decision engine that relies on attribute based policies and dynamic trust and privacy evaluation. The resulting platform demonstrates the integration of the ABAC model, the evolving context, and the attributes of actors and resources.     

On the use of software design models in software development practice: An empirical investigation

Research into software design models in general, and into the UML in particular, focuses on answering the question how design models are used, completely ignoring the question if they are used. There is an assumption in the literature that the UML is the de facto standard, and that use of design models has had a profound and substantial effect on how software is designed by virtue of models giving the ability to do model-checking, code generation, or automated test generation. However for this assumption to be true, there has to be significant use of design models in practice by developers.This paper presents the results of a survey summarizing the answers of 3785 developers answering the simple question on the extent to which design models are used before coding. We relate their use of models with (i) total years of programming experience, (ii) open or closed development, (iii) educational level, (iv) programming language used, and (v) development type.The answer to our question was that design models are not used very extensively in industry, and where they are used, the use is informal and without tool support, and the notation is often not UML. The use of models decreased with an increase in experience and increased with higher level of qualification. Overall we found that models are used primarily as a communication and collaboration mechanism where there is a need to solve problems and/or get a joint understanding of the overall design in a group. We also conclude that models are seldom updated after initially created and are usually drawn on a whiteboard or on paper.     

信用扩散与信用扩散场：一种MAS信用机制研究的新方法

为了研究复杂网络环境中MAS（Multi-Agent Systems）信用机制，本文引入信用扩散和信用扩散场的思想。为研究MAS的信用机制提供一种新的思路和方法。定义和分析了信用扩散系统，建立了信用扩散场数学模型，将影响信用扩散的主要因素加以抽象，建立了信用扩散场的三维空间坐标，为信用扩散构建了扩散的空间。并根据信用扩散场模型，提出了一种单源点信用梯度扩散算法。     

The key role of relevance in personalized advertisement: Examining its impact on perceptions of privacy invasion,self-awareness,and continuous use intentions

Internet advertising has become increasingly personalized as advertisers tailor content to individual users. However, this has led consumers to be concerned about their privacy. Based on rational choice theory and self-awareness theory, the current research explores the role of relevance in personalized advertisements and examines its impact on perceptions of privacy invasion, self-awareness, and subsequent continuous use intentions of personalized advertising. Analysis of survey data from 386 online users found that although privacy invasion perceptions are negatively related to continuous use intentions, perceived advertisement relevance mitigates consumer's privacy concerns. Perceived relevance was also found to be positively related to consumer's continuous use intentions through the mediation of self-awareness. This research identifies and highlights the importance of relevance in the tension between privacy concerns and personalized advertisements.     

不可连接的前向安全可撤销匿名代理签名体制

将前向概念引入匿名代理签名中,提出一个不可连接的前向安全可撤销匿名代理签名体制,其特点在于代理签名人的身份除对原始签名人外是保密的,代理签名人可以根据原始签名人的授权产生前向安全的签名,验证者可以验证代理签名的正确性,但无法揭示代理签名人的身份,出现争议时原始签名人可以揭示代理签名人的真实身份,而这个过程不需要可信中心...     

An empirical analysis of the computerization of interactive software evaluation systems

This research studies factor analysis of traditional survey- questionnaires for interactive software evaluation in order to construct a Principal Factor Conversion Function (PFCF). Such a PFCF may be used in several ways: first, for exploratory purposes, to discover the principal factors of the traditional questionnaire; second to test the potential of data reduction within significant loss of information; and third to compare the traditional manual evaluation to a condensed computerized interactive software evaluation. A CAI system was used as the software to be evaluated in this research.     

Web mining and privacy concerns: Some important legal issues to be consider before applying any data and information extraction technique in web-based environments

Web mining is a concept that gathers all techniques, methods and algorithms used to extract information and knowledge from data originating on the web (web data). A part of this technique aims to analyze the behavior of users in order to continuously improve both the structure and content of visited web sites. Behind this quite altruistic belief – namely, to help the user feel comfortable when they visit a site through a personalization process – there underlie a series of processing methodologies which operate at least arguably from the point of view of the users’ privacy.Thus, an important question arises; to what extent may the desire to improve the services offered through a web site infringe upon the privacy of those who visit it? The use of powerful processing tools such as those provided by web mining may threaten users’ privacy.Current legal scholarship on privacy issues suggests a flexible approach that enables the determination, within each particular context, of those behaviors that can threaten individual privacy. However, it has been observed that TIC professionals, with the purpose of formulating practical rules on this matter, have a very narrow-minded concept of privacy, primarily centered on the dichotomy between personal identifiable information (PII) and anonymous data.The aim of this paper is to adopt an integrative approach based on the distinctive attributes of web mining in order to determine which techniques and uses are harmful.     

信任网络中的依赖关系分析与消除

针对现有的信任聚合方法普遍存在因推荐信息损耗或重复计算等导致信任度量结果与直接推荐之间偏差增大的问题,首先引入信任子图及左部与右部结点等相关概念,并证明了信任子图中依赖关系与结点入度及出度之间的关联性,在此基础上,提出了一种有效的依赖关系消除算法,最后,给出了一个数值计算实例来说明该方法的可行性和有效性。     

Subjective evaluation of software evolvability using code smells: An empirical study

This paper presents the results of an empirical study on the subjective evaluation of code smells that identify poorly evolvable structures in software. We propose use of the term software evolvability to describe the ease of further developing a piece of software and outline the research area based on four different viewpoints. Furthermore, we describe the differences between human evaluations and automatic program analysis based on software evolvability metrics. The empirical component is based on a case study in a Finnish software product company, in which we studied two topics. First, we looked at the effect of the evaluator when subjectively evaluating the existence of smells in code modules. We found that the use of smells for code evaluation purposes can be difficult due to conflicting perceptions of different evaluators. However, the demographics of the evaluators partly explain the variation. Second, we applied selected source code metrics for identifying four smells and compared these results to the subjective evaluations. The metrics based on automatic program analysis and the human-based smell evaluations did not fully correlate. Based upon our results, we suggest that organizations should make decisions regarding software evolvability improvement based on a combination of subjective evaluations and code metrics. Due to the limitations of the study we also recognize the need for conducting more refined studies and experiments in the area of software evolvability.

Antecedents and consequences of perceived value in Mobile Government continuance use: An empirical research in China

This paper examines the antecedents and consequences of perceived value in m-government continuance use. Drawing upon service science studies and Chinese m-government context, a research model is constructed by extending the technology acceptance model (TAM). Data collected from a field survey of 326 m-government users are analyzed to test the proposed hypotheses. The results indicate that perceived value is strongly influenced by mobility, perceived usefulness and security, which is, in turn, significant impact on satisfaction and trust in technology, trust in agent and trust in government. These results contribute to drawing attention to the important role of perceived value in m-government continuance use and providing a new view that supplements to the extant technology acceptance research.