Legal Issues Of E-Commerce
Legal, ethical and societal issues
of electronic commerce
Tanzu Mursel
Introduction
Opinion and marketing research conducted over the Internet must conform to the same standard rules and ethical principles as normal marketing. This of course poses several issues. The Internet doesn't exist as a market per se, but in many ways, it is a very real type of its own country. Many analysts claim that programs such as Facebook are actually becoming their own countries, with a client base that has no nationality, but a very real market. In an age of globalization at many levels of business, the Internet is the very driving force behind the abolition of the borders.
The rapid growth of the Internet has opened dramatic new opportunities for collecting and disseminating research information worldwide. At the same time it raises a number of ethical and technical issues which must be addressed if the Internet is to be used effectively and responsibly for opinion and marketing research purposes. The fact that the Internet is inexpensive to use and difficult to regulate means that it can be open to misuse by less experienced or less scrupulous organizations, often based outside the research industry. Any Internet surveys that fall below the high standards promoted by the research organizations of the world will make it more difficult for legitimate researchers to use the Internet for research. Misuse of Internet opinion and marketing research could seriously damage the credibility of legitimate opinion and marketing research and is an abuse of the goodwill of Internet respondents and users in general. Many different ethical guidelines have been created to protect the interests both of Internet respondents and of the users of Internet research findings. Because information technology and the Internet are evolving and changing so rapidly, it is not practical to discuss in detail all the technical features of Internet...
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