News release: ” Customer satisfaction with social media, search engines and online news and opinion websites is up, according to the E-Business Report released today by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The latest results reveal a 2.9 percent rise in user satisfaction with e-business websites to 73.4 on ACSI’s 100-point scale. “Even with improvements across… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Category Archives: E-Commerce
Stop Sneaky Online Tracking with EFF’s Privacy Badger
“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released a beta version of Privacy Badger, a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that detects and blocks online advertising and other embedded content that tracks you without your permission. Privacy Badger was launched in an alpha version less than three months ago, and already more than 150,000 users have… Continue Reading
New kind of tracking tool, canvas fingerprinting, is being used to follow visitors to thousands of top websites
ProPublica and Mashable – “A new, extremely persistent type of online tracking is shadowing visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.com. First documented in a forthcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium, this type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor’s Web browser to draw a hidden image. Because each… Continue Reading
Can Twitter survive in a Facebook world? The key is being different
“News organizations have been reporting in recent weeks that Twitter’s growth rate has been slowing, which has spurred speculation about its future. The Pew Research Center has watched social networking in the U.S. grow faster and change more than most other internet activities, and that landscape continues to evolve quickly. Our studies have shown that Twitter occupies an important segment of… Continue Reading
FTC Alleges Amazon Unlawfully Billed Parents for Millions of Dollars In Children’s Unauthorized In-App Charges
News release: “Amazon.com, Inc. has billed parents and other account holders for millions of dollars in unauthorized in-app charges incurred by children, according to a Federal Trade Commission complaint filed today in federal court. The FTC’s lawsuit seeks a court order requiring refunds to consumers for the unauthorized charges and permanently banning the company from billing parents and… Continue Reading
For Many Americans, Stress Takes A Toll On Health And Family
NPR – “Stress is part of the human condition, unavoidable and even necessary to a degree. But too much stress can be toxic — even disabling. And there’s a lot of toxic stress out there A national poll done by NPR with our partners at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health finds that more than… Continue Reading
Facebook Experiments Had Few Limits – WSJ
Follow up to previous posting – Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment – Study, via WSJ.com – Facebook Experiments Had Few Limits, Data Science Lab Conducted Tests on Users With Little Oversight: Reed Albergotti – “Since its creation in 2007, Facebook’s Data Science group has run hundreds of tests. One published study deconstructed how… Continue Reading
Government Surveillance and Internet Search Behavior
Marthews, Alex and Tucker, Catherine, Government Surveillance and Internet Search Behavior (March 24, 2014). Available or download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2412564 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2412564 “This paper uses data from Google Trends on search terms from before and after the surveillance revelations of June 2013 to analyze whether Google users’ search behavior shifted as a result of an exogenous shock in… Continue Reading
Digital Life in 2025 – Net Threats
Pew Research Center: “As Internet experts look to the future of the Web, they have a number of concerns. This is not to say they are pessimistic: The majority of respondents to this 2014 Future of the Internet canvassing say they hope that by 2025 there will not be significant changes for the worse and… Continue Reading
California removes ban on alternative currencies – Computerworld
Jeremy Kirk – “A new California law removes a ban on using currencies other than the U.S. dollar, which is intended to accommodate the growing use of alternative payment methods such as bitcoin. The law, signed by state Governor Jerry Brown on Saturday, is likely to boost confidence around bitcoin, as regulators and tax authorities worldwide… Continue Reading
Ebooks v paper – An Essay
Julian Baggini, Financial Times – [snipped] “E-reading is certainly on the rise. The Pew Research Center reports that, as recently as 2010, hardly anyone in the US had an e-reader or tablet. Now half do. The proportion of the population who have read an ebook in the past year rose from 17 per cent in… Continue Reading
Houston, We Have A Public Domain Problem – Commentary
Parker Higgins is an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “I received a bogus copyright takedown notice for using public domain audio on SoundCloud yesterday. The sound in question—the famous “Houston, we have a problem” snippet of the Apollo 13 mission—is incontrovertibly available to all, for any use, without copyright restrictions. The fact that it’s… Continue Reading
