Blog Assignment 5

            The media and government have had to deal with online illegal activity ever since the Internet was created. Due to the fact that this issue is not going away any time soon, we must think about what we can do to reduce, if not completely eliminate, this activity. I propose three ideas to help with this issue. The first is to reduce the cost of whichever type of media is being downloaded. Many people think songs, albums, movies, etc. cost too much money. If the price of these items were reduced, more people might be willing to purchase them instead of illegally downloading them for free.

            My second suggestion is to charge users a monthly fee to have access to these websites that provide illegal downloads. Some sort of agreement would have to be made between the organization that sells the music, movies, etc. and the website that usually provides illegal downloadable material, though, so that the original provider of the media would receive an agreeable amount of money. This way, people would still be able to use the once illegal downloading websites they have always used, but be able to do so now in a legal manner.

            My third and final solution is to create an incentive program to encourage online consumers to purchase the material from its original source. This could be implemented by celebrating users who do purchase materials legally by providing them with the opportunity to win a reward or gift. Users who legally download or purchase material would be entered into a drawing to receive anything from a new Ipod to a gift card to a paid vacation in an exotic destination. Online users would be able to choose which drawing they would be most interested in. I think this would motivate people to buy materials legally if they knew there was a chance they could win an impressive prize. 

Blog Assignment 4

        The article, Privacy-Enhanced Personalization, written by Alfred Kobsa, explains how both web users and vendors value personalized content, but how certain issues make it difficult to please both parties. There are many perceived privacy threats to users, including unsolicited marketing, price discrimination, unauthorized access to accounts, and government surveillance. Around the turn of the century, it was decided that in order for there to be a balance between privacy and personalization, there would have to be some sort of trade-off between them; with an increase of personalization, there would require a decrease of privacy and vice versa. But now the interdisciplinary field of privacy-enhanced personalization strives for the best possible personalization within privacy boundaries.
        One privacy theory states that privacy-related behaviors result from a cost-benefit analysis, where potential risks of disclosing personal information are weighed against potential benefits. Different factors, such as age, education, and income, have been shown to affect the degree of this privacy concern. As far as disclosing information goes, users will provide certain information (demographics, lifestyle, hobbies, etc.) without hesitation, but will not willingly give other information, such as credit card details, social security numbers, and financial or contact information. Web users believe they should have the right to know how their personal information is being used and be able to have a certain amount of control over it; this is why trust is very important between user and website. Five elements result in a website having trust: 1) positive past experience, 2) design and operation of website, 3) reputation of website operator, 4) presence of a privacy statement, and 5) presence of a privacy seal.
        Many privacy laws and guidelines have been created to deal with this privacy issue online. Users have embraced pseudonymous user models as well as principles of fair information practices. Another approach is personalizing systems so that users’ data is located on the client side instead of the server side. Other techniques have been proposed to help protect the privacy of users of collaborative-filtering based recommender systems. Although no “silver bullet” exists at this time regarding this issue of privacy, many small enhancements are now available to test out on users.
        This article is very perplexing. I had never thought very deeply about online privacy before reading this. I now know that it is difficult on both the user and the vendor to find a middle ground on privacy issues. Hopefully there will be a solution to this problem in the near future so that both users and vendors can benefit from it. My question, which we briefly touched on in class, is whether the age of online users has an impact on how much information they are willing to give away. I would be interested to see if teenagers, nowadays, will give information more readily than, say, college-aged people.