Week 11 Questions

Question 1 -
See if you can find an example of a privacy breach that was reported in the Australian or international news in the last 6 months.

1. What were the consequences? i.e. legal, political, financial, personal etc.

Privacy must be part of a comprehensive Security program. The consequences of Kaiser Permanente's Bellflower hospital's privacy breach is legal liability and personal.

2. What action was taken in response to the privacy breach?

The law allows the Department of Public Health to impose fines against healthcare facilities of up to $25,000 per patient for the first violation and $17,500 for each additional violation, up to $250,000. As a result, California health regulators fined Kaiser Permanente's Bellflower hospital $250,000 on May 15, 2009.

3. What can you do about privacy?

This is reletivly complex and differect problem. According to personal level, one should pay attention to who you give the information to; and the way you gave. In addition, at a business level, comapnies should have a strong security system to protect and moniter their database. It may be helpful to conceptualize as follows: Security – Authentication & Privacy-Authorization. This approach may seem almost absurdly reductionist, nevertheless, this is a very useful concept in the development of a privacy policy.

Articles:

Kaiser hospital fined $250,000 for privacy breach in octuplet case

The Bellflower facility, where 23 unauthorized workers accessed Nadya Suleman's records, is the first to be monetarily penalized under a new state law.

By Charles Ornstein May 15, 2009

Reporting from New York -- California health regulators fined Kaiser Permanente's Bellflower hospital $250,000 Thursday for failing to keep employees from snooping in the medical records of Nadya Suleman, the mother who set off a media frenzy after giving birth to octuplets in January.The fine is the first monetary penalty imposed and largest allowed under a new state law enacted last year after widely publicized violations of privacy at UCLA Medical Center involving Farrah Fawcett, Britney Spears, California First Lady Maria Shriver and other celebrities.

Since the law took effect Jan. 1, hospitals have reported about 300 incidents in which patient records were inappropriately accessed or disclosed. Most of those were inadvertent, such as giving discharge instructions or medication orders to the wrong patients, but some involved prying into patients' records without permission.

The state Department of Public Health found that breaches of Suleman's records extended beyond the Bellflower hospital and continued even after Kaiser first informed regulators it had a breach. Eight workers at other Kaiser hospitals and the chain's regional office were among those implicated, said Kathleen Billingsley, deputy director of the Public Health Department's Center for Health Care Quality.

The steps Kaiser took to protect Suleman's privacy were not aggressive enough, Billingsley and other state health officials said.

"It's the hospital's job to prevent these breaches from occurring, not just crack down after the fact," said Kim Belshé, secretary of California's Health and Human Services.

The law allows the Department of Public Health to impose fines against healthcare facilities of up to $25,000 per patient for the first violation and $17,500 for each additional violation, up to $250,000. A separate law allows fines to be imposed against individual healthcare workers. Belshé said the Kaiser workers were still being investigated by the California Office of Health Information Integrity, which will decide whether individual penalties will be imposed.

"The fine issued today should be a reminder that there are consequences for violations of medical privacy," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a written statement.

Kaiser told the public health agency on Feb. 5 that two employees inappropriately accessed the records of Suleman, who gave birth on Jan. 26 to the world's only surviving octuplets, according to a Public Health Department report issued Thursday. By Feb. 20, six employees had been identified as having accessed records without authorization. On March 20, 17 more employees were added to the list, including two doctors, for a total of 23.

Of those, 15 were either terminated or resigned under pressure and eight faced other disciplinary actions, the state said in a report. The doctors were among those disciplined, not fired.

As is common practice, the state did not identify Suleman by name, but the facts, dates and circumstances match those of her case.

Kaiser spokesman Jim Anderson said the hospital took numerous steps to protect Suleman's privacy. It issued repeated warnings to staff members about privacy laws and added a prompt to her computerized records warning employees of the consequences for looking without permission.

Anderson said there was no proof that any of the employees leaked information to the media. "We share the department's concern for patient confidentiality, which is why we took all the strong action we took in this case," Anderson said. "Despite everything we did to try to prevent these kinds of things from happening, it is obvious that curiosity got the better of some people."

Jeffery Czech, Suleman's lawyer, said his client was not happy that unauthorized personnel looked at her records. But given the amount of gossip that has been printed about her private life, Czech said, "she's a little deadened to it."

"I think Kaiser handled it professionally. They found out, they terminated the employees, they brought it to our attention. They certainly didn't try to hide it," he said.

In their report, state officials said Kaiser's risk management office did not produce a list of all the employees who accessed Suleman's records until Feb. 5, more than a week after she gave birth.

"I believe that they should have anticipated it," Billingsley said. "If you know someone is coming in, a well-known individual or something that has the potential for other people to be curious . . . you should be able to come up with a solution."

Kaiser has 10 days to decide whether to appeal the fine. Anderson said officials were still evaluating the matter.

The breaches involving Fawcett's medical records -- first reported by The Times in April 2008 -- enraged California lawmakers and prompted the new law. In Fawcett's case, a low-level UCLA employee accessed her records more often than her own doctors. The employee pleaded guilty last year to federal felony charges of selling the information to the National Enquirer. The woman died of cancer in March before she could be sentenced.

Although state inspectors last year found widespread privacy violations at UCLA, the hospital cannot be fined under the state law because the breaches took place before the law took effect.

Federal law prohibits the unauthorized accessing of a patient's medical records. Since 2003, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has received nearly 44,000 privacy complaints. The agency has said it favors helping facilities make needed changes voluntarily as opposed to imposing fines.

Dr. Deborah Peel, founder of Patient Privacy Rights Foundation in Austin, Texas, said new technologies should be used to prevent unauthorized workers from accessing data in the first place.

"Fines are a last resort and I'm sure they will help," Peel said, but unprotected patient information is "like leaving money in an unlocked room."

Source: Los Angeles Times, 2009. Avaliable from http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-privacy15-2009may15,0,2916906.story

Question 2 - Have you been using Turnitin software this semester? If you have was it a positive or negative experience and why?

Yes, I have used Thruitin software this semester only once for Fundamentals of Law. I do not think this system helps me a lot. Because once you submit your assignment within references, Turnitin will caculate the same reference with other students. However, it is quite often to use the same books to do a assignment in a same subject. Hence, didn’t think that this was of any benefit because if you had a few words that are the same as someone else has written in the past it means nothing because it would be so easy to do. As a result, I do not believe it benefit students a lot.

Week 10 Questions

1.What does this meant by the following statements?

Trust is not associative (non-symmetric)：There may be a big difference between buyer sides and seller sides.The sellers may have a high amount of trust that the buyer will provide the money or good agreed on for the good they are selling. While they buyer may have less trust that the seller will provide the goods or service agreed upon.

Trust is not transitive : Seller must build trust among the large number of customers in order to have the possibility of trust transtion. Sometimes, people begin to kind of formulate trust around the other party.As people come to a relatively new medium for the first time or are still relatively novice users; how does trust play a role in engaging them in commerce and drawing them into a relationship that they feel competent and is going to work?

Trust is always between exactly 2 parties : The defination of trust is that the assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something, or one in which confidence is placed. This always between the trust party and trustee party.

Trust will involve either direct trust or recommender trust : Direct trust relates to a consumer basing their judgment of trust on their perspective to the transaction taking place. Recommender trust relates to a consumer basing their judgment on the views of others who have already had experience in the said transaction.

2.（a） Have a look at the following websites. What are some of the elements that have been incorporated to increase your trust in the sites? If there are also some aspects which decrease your level of trust describe them as well.

• http://www.eBay.com.au: One of the elements increasing eBay's trust is eBay's brand name. eBay is a well-known brand all over the world. People will have trust on this website because this. In addition, eBay also have security center which goves tips on increasing the users security.it gives confidence that security is an important aspect for this site as it has a dedicated section for it. The layout is also neat, which gives an indication that the site has had some kind of time given to it. It only cost a few minutes. Nevertheless, eBay is person-to-person. Although the website owns trust, costomers still have risk to deal with other persons.

• http://www.anz.com.au: ANZ is a well established brand therefore this increases the element of trust that is associated with the website. Moreover, It has Security Alerts which show any kind of threat towards ANZ customers. It also provides advice on accessing the site and telling their customers what they won't do; for example, send emails regarding the confirmation of details.

• http://www.ozrural.com: Compared to the above discussed, this website is not as famous as them. This could probably reduce the trust of this website compared with the above two. However, this one is still well set out. The design of this website is perty good. One element of trust is the Google search engine as Google is such a well known and trusted brand. Other elements of trust include the blog (even though it hasn’t being updated much) as it can appear like you are dealing with a real person you know, not just a website or someone you don’t know. This makes the website more personal and hence increases the trust. The elements that could decrease trust in this website are the fact that compared to the other websites that have been looked at this is the one that is laid out the worst. It isn’t laid out badly but you can tell it has not been done by a professional like the other websites.

• http://www.paypal.com.au: Paypal is famous payment method. It is verified by a well known "verifier" (for lack of a better word). This gives confidence to the user that the site is legitimate in what it is offering. First and foremost, this website has a very good layout. Second, it has a security center. Third, it has VeriSign Identify Protection logo. (VeriSign is an organisation that has developed and is promoting a set of principles and criteria for WebTrust.)

2.（b） Find a web site yourself that you think looks untrustworthy.

A web site that I find seems untrustworthy is www.taobao.com. Although it is the largest online shopping website in China, there is still several problems with it. It do have many good credit standing stores on it, but still many fraudulent stores within it. Just like eBay, there are too many sellers to manage. In addition, anyone can open a online store though a simple authentication. So usually the real products have big differences from the online pictures. As a result, i do not trust this web site.

Week 9 Channel Conflict

1.From a business point of view the world could be seen as a number of different channels to reach customers.The use of the Internet as a channel to reach consumers has lead to potential channel conflict.

2.Definition of Channel Conflict:
Channel conflict occurs when manufacturers (or usually the brand owner) disintermediate their channel partners, such as distributors, retailers, dealers, and sales representatives, by selling their products direct to consumers through general marketing methods and/or over the internet through eCommerce. This is happening all the time now and businesses will need to develop strategies to cope with it. Channel conflict can be defined as 'any situation where two different marketing or distribution channels are competing for the same sale with the same brand'.

3.Types of Conflict：

（1）Direct – Manufacturers launch new channel
（2）Internal Conflict – new online competes with existing offline
（3）External – manufacturer doesn’t own online or offline channel-least threatening

4.Where does conflict show itself?

（1）Pricing
（2）Order handling
（3）Delivery
（4）Service and repair
（5）Customer service
（6）Resistance to change

5.Manage channel conflict：

（1）Understand channel members interests and anticipate of conflicts

（2）Set clear goal

（3）Communicate your intentions clearly and provide information and training

（4）Take strategy decisions which limit conflict

6.Conclusion：

（1）Channel conflict will not go away by itself
（2）Needs active management
（3）There are many positive examples today such as multi‑channel strategies

Week 8 Questions

Q1: eBay is one of the only major Internet "pure plays" to consistently make a profit from its inception. What is eBay's business model? Why has it been so successful? eBay’s business model is the broker model. “eBay acts as a broker, bringing buyers and sellers together and taking a listing fee on products listed over its site and a commission on things sold” (Rappa, 2005).

eBay has been successful because “eBay was one of the first auction Web sites and because it pursued an aggressive promotion strategy. It becomes the first-choice site for many people who want to participate in auctions. Both buyers and sellers benefit from a large marketplace such as the one eBay created” (Schneider, 2007, p. 264).

Q2: Other major web sites, like Amazon.com and Yahoo!, have entered the auction marketplace with far less success than eBay. How has eBay been able to maintain its dominant position?
eBay keeps improving themselves to become better all the time, which enable it to maintain its dominant position. In addition, eBay does not have any stock at all. Nevertheless, Amozon.com has large amount of stock. In this aspect, eBay perform better than Amozon.com.

Q3: What method does eBay use to reduce the potential for fraud among traders on its site? What kinds of fraud, if any, are eBay users most susceptible? eBay use feedback made by buyers and sellers on the website to decrease the potential for fraud among traders on its website. Buyer and sellers understand that they’re playing a role in a larger community and that they have a set of shared values and that there’s acceptable behaviour and unacceptable behaviour, that there’s rewards to being a member, a fair playing member of the community”. “They really must instill in its ever-growing membership their sense of participating in a larger community and the importance of adopting or internalizing the values of that community” (Rappa, 2005). Moreover, PayPal is another method that eBay uses to reduce the potential fraud. PayPal is the safer, easier way to pay and get paid online. Buyers who buy items on eBay must pay though PayPal.

There are several kinds of fraud those eBay users most susceptible, they are:
1.When a buyer buy something online, he or she receives the item which is quite different what described on the Internet
2.When a buyer has already paid money of the item to the seller, however he or she doesn’t receive the item.
3.When a person won the bid, but he or she doesn’t pay the money to the seller.

Q4: eBay makes every effort to conceptualize its users as a community (as opposed to, say "customers" or "clients"). What is the purpose of this conceptual twist and does eBay gain something by doing it?
The main purpose of the conceptual twist of conceptualising its users as a community is that the members are more likely to feel like they are inside and they are part of something. People will feel more comfortable in this atmosphere. Of course, eBay gains a lot of by doing this. Members will more like to participate in it.

Q5: eBay has long been a marketplace for used goods and collectibles. Today, it is increasingly a place where major businesses come to auction their wares. Why would a brand name vendor set-up shop on eBay?In the words of Rappa, (2005) that vendor set-up shop on eBay are “means of expanding their business to reach new customers and to explore different ways of pricing their product”. In addition, many customers prefer online store to physical stores. So a lot of physical store holders tend to open online shop as well in order to attracting more customers. As a result, this will help them gain more profit.

Week 7 Questions

1.Write one paragraph describing the Turing Test and another paragraph describing an argument against the Turing Test, known as the Chinese room.

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen.

It was described by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," in which Turing considers the question "can machines think?" Since "thinking" is difficult to define, Turing chose to "replace the question by another which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words." Turing's new question is: "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the Turing test”. This question, Turing believed, is one that can actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against all the major objections to this proposition. In the years since 1950, the test has proven to be both highly influential and widely criticized, and it is an essential concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence (Wikipedia, 2009).

The Chinese Room argument, devised by John Searle, is an argument against the possibility of true artificial intelligence. The argument centers on a thought experiment in which someone who knows only English sits alone in a room following English instructions for manipulating strings of Chinese characters, such that to those outside the room it appears as if someone in the room understands Chinese. The argument is intended to show that while suitably programmed computers may appear to converse in natural language, they are not capable of understanding language, even in principle. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. Searle's argument is a direct challenge to proponents of Artificial Intelligence, and the argument also has broad implications for functionalist and computational theories of meaning and of mind. As a result, there have been many critical replies to the argument. The many issues raised by the Chinese Room argument will not be settled until there is a consensus about the nature of meaning, its relation to syntax, and about the nature of consciousness. There continues to be significant disagreement about what processes create meaning, understanding, and consciousness, and what can be proven a priori by thought experiments (David, C, 2004).

2. Can virtual agents succeed in delivering high-quality customer service over the Web? Think of examples which support or disprove the question or just offer an opinion based on your personal experience.

I think that virtual agents can deliver high quality customer service over the Web. For example, when I purchased a lomo cream online. I content the seller on MSN; because that was the first time I have used a lomo I asked a lot of question till late in the night. The buyer answered with great patient. This was very high quality service. Buyers can content sellers convenient all the time through the Internet. As a result, we can draw a conclusion that virtual agents succeed in delivering high-quality customer service over the Web.

Week 6 Exercises

Question 1
a) What experiences have you had with shopping online?

I have brought books on www.dangdang.com, which is an online shopping web site like Amozne.com. Moreover, I also have brought several items on Ebay.

b) Describe a good experience.

The first time I brought books on dangdang.com, I didn’t have net bank. And the web site has a service that I can pay cash when I receive the books. I think it very convenient and 人性化 which gave me a good experience.

c) What did you like about the online store you used?

First and foremost, the prices of books are relatively cheap. Secondly, the online bookshop has large amount of kinds of books. Thirdly, it is easy and quick to purchase books.

d) Describe a bad experience.

Once, I booked several items online. It claimed that they would be ready in a week. However, it took me two weeks time.

e) What problems did you have with the online store?

I cannot see the real products. As a result, the real products often have some differences from the online pictures. In addition, there are always some problem with the Internet and the security of paying matters.

f) What features make an online store more appealing?

1. Attractive price
2. Indoor shopping
3. Various kinds of products in one store

g) What features make an online store less appealing?

1. Safety of payments
2. Quality of goods
3. After-sell service

h) Should we expect to see the prices of goods and services rise or fall due to the migration of consumers online?

It is not sure whether the prices of goods and services will rise or fall due to the migration of consumers online. Nevertheless, in my opinion the prices of goods and services will fall due to the migration of consumers online. Because it is cheaper to conduct business online and the physical stores will lower their prices to keep their customers from buying cheaper goods and services online.

Question 2

a) The dispersion of prices (that is, the spread between the lowest and highest price for a particular product) will narrow.

I do not think that the dispersion of prices will narrow. There will always be varying degrees of quality for one particular product, which is one of the reasons for price dispersion which will not change with digital markets.

b) The importance of brand names will decrease.

I do not think the importance of brand names will decrease because of the development of online market.

c) Price competition will make all products cheaper.

In my opinion, price competition will make all products cheaper to some extent. Because the majority of customers who do online shopping focusing on the price. If the price is higher than that in real world, they will choose to buy the cheaper goods in real world.

d) Digital markets will become dominated by a handful of mega-sites, like Amazon.com.

Whether it is in the digital markets or physical markets there will always be more dominate stores. However the digital market will not be completely dominated by a handful of mega-sites, like Amazon.com. Large site might have difficulty competing with mega-sites such as Amazon.com, but on the other hand small specialised sites.

e) How do you think the balance of power between buyer’s and sellers will change?

I believe that the balance of power between buyer’s and sellers’ will shift to the buyers more than seller. Because there are more and more online stores and people are having increasingly number of options. As a result, Sellers will do more to attract customer, such as give customers more power.

f) Prices are clustered online.

I do not agree with this statement. Because online trading cannot be one of the reasons for price clustering.

g) Online prices are elastic. ( i.e. immune to change up and down with demand)

I think that online prices are elastic because of the following reasons. Firstly, online sold goods are not necessary for people’s daily life. Secondly, it always depends on the good or service not where they are sold to determine whether the price is elastic or inelastic.

h) Online prices are generally transparent (the extent to which prices for a given product or service are known by buyers in the marketplace.).

I believe this point of view to some extent. Because buyers online should view other sellers’ price. They cannot make price very high because this can keep potential buyers away. Sellers should make price to let buyers have a look at their goods. As a result, there would exist possibility to buy it.

Question 3

a) What types of m-commerce services does your cell phone provider offer?

They provide online store including mapping software, games and so on. They also offer online bills and other convince services.

b) Which of these services do you use?

I just use online bills.

c) What types of transactions do you perform through your cell phone or other wireless device?

I prefer m-commerce transactions though Internet.

d) What types of transactions would you like to perform, but are currently unable to?

None.

e) What is your opinion of wireless advertising/mobile marketing?

In my personal opinion, advertising is everywhere nowadays, such on TV, on the Internet, through cell phone (text massage), on the streets, etc. Therefore, I think that wireless advertising/mobile marketing could take advertising to a more personal level.