Why E-Commerce Would Raise Ethical, Social, And Political Issues and How to Avoid It?

With the development of e-commerce, technical problems are gradually no longer the object that people need to worry about. On the contrary, whether it is the disclosure of personal privacy or the infringement of intellectual property rights, all kinds of ethical, social and political issues raised in e-commerce have become the focus of people’s attention.

But why the Internet and its use in e-commerce have raised pervasive ethical, social, and political issues on a scale unprecedented for computer technology?

Part of the answer lies in the underlying features of Internet technology itself, and the ways in which it has been exploited by business firms. Internet technology and its use in e-commerce disrupt existing social and business relationships and understandings.

It is precisely because the internet makes the world as a whole that personal privacy can easily be spread around the world in an instant. Imagine this: the first second you post a selfie of yourself eating a cookie in New York, the next people in Paris would know you’re eating a vanilla cookie. Internet is just like automobiles, before automobiles, there was very little interstate crime and very little federal jurisdiction over crime. Likewise, with the Internet: before the Internet, there was very little “cybercrime”.

What exactly does the concept “ethical, social and political issues raised in e-commerce” mean?

Ethical, social, and political issues are interrelated. In short, the introduction of the Internet and e-commerce impacts individuals, societies, and political institutions. These impacts can be classified into four moral dimensions: property rights, information rights, governance, and public safety and welfare.

For most Internet users, what they are most concerned about is whether they inadvertently reveal their privacy when using the Internet.

In fact, almost all e-commerce companies collect some personally identifiable information in addition to anonymous information and use cookies to track clickstream behavior of visitors. Advertising networks and search engines also track the behavior of consumers across thousands of popular sites, not just at one site, via cookies, spyware, search engine behavioral targeting, and other techniques.

This blog will briefly introduce how to protect online privacy from the following aspects.

In addition to the above-mentioned ethical, social and political issues, Internet and e-commerce also bring about major public safety, welfare issues and other issues. Although it is difficult to completely avoid these issues, they can be reduced to some extent by law, industry self-regulation, and advances in technology, thus providing a better development environment for e-commerce.