Monday, July 6, 2009

Legal





In today’s modern era of electronic technology, many people want to get their work done faster without much effort. At times, people forget or do not consider the legal and ethical values of their procedures. Therefore it is important for us to have a glance at what is legal in e-commerce. Legal issue in e-commerce is law that is enacted by the government and developed through common law. Laws are mainly strict, legal rules, and governing the act within their jurisdiction. In contrast, ethics are referred as a branch of philosophy that deals with what is right and wrong. Therefore for those companies that is using e-commerce as a medium to conduct business has to adhere to all the legal or ethical issues. Non compliance of this ethical issue can damage the company’s reputation and in worst case it may lead to loss of business.

E- Commerce is also popular not only for doing business but people also use the internet for shopping and banking purposes. Therefore many people do not realized that by using internet their private information may leak to unauthorized party. For example an individual who wish to shop online may just visit a particular website, click on the item that they wish to buy, drag it to the shopping cart and enter their credit card detail. However, this information has to pass through few hands before their transaction can be process. Therefore, websites should provide the customers with choices regarding the use of their personal information, and incorporate security procedures to limit access to customer information by unauthorized parties. Moreover websites should also provide customers with the choice of how much information that they wish to disclose. Beside privacy copy right has also become an important legal issue in e-commerce. For those music industries who do not wish their songs to be copied without proper permission they may enable exploitation of music samples and audio format. Where else software that is available on the internet for free of cost can be transfer without permission from the right holder. For example Napster, MP3 providers and many more.

Tips for avoiding e-Commerce Consumer Fraud

Check unusual “Ship To” Addresses – be aware for request to send merchandise as a gift to an unknown address because thieves often use this trick to ship the product to another destination whereby they can pick up the product without being notice by others.

Identify Big Spenders – excessive fees are paid by thieves to ship product quickly. This thieves are also know to be big ticket purchases whereby they will use stolen card, receive the merchandise and resell it at higher price to make a huge profit out of the sale.

Secure Payment Gateways - Securing your payment gateway is referring to the “behind the scenes” transfer of personal information between your transactions pages (the page where the order is placed), the merchant account (your bank) and the credit card company. This is one of the most important components requires the acceptance of credit cards for your e-Commerce business. In order to protect their client and have a secure gateway it is important to have credit card processing services which can be expensive but no e-Commerce business can actually operate without it.

In my opinion there are many ways to secure an online transaction. It all depends on the business operators whether they are willing to spend a little more in order to provide a secure online transaction to their customers.

References
http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php/ECommerce_-_Legal_and_Ethical_Issues

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v4i49_nasir.html










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