Web site planning and Internet privacy are only two considerations for any business — or individual — online today.
Experts offered their advice at the eBusiness: Cutting Edge Issues workshop at Odyssey 2001: Journey to Success, the Women’s Summit at Bryant College held on March 14.
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Drew Diskin, business consultant for New Jersey-based new media firm INERTIA, LLC, said that first of all, it’s important to take a look at all the tangibles.
“The answer is not what it is, it’s how you use it for yourself and your customers,” he said. “It’s not a solution, it’s a tool.”
About half of the workshop’s attendees indicated they had a Web site, through a show of hands, but nobody responded that they were completely happy with it.
First, one should know what functions a Web site will need to perform, Diskin said.
“It’s like a car,” he said. “Is it a sports car? Are you going off-road with it? Is it a bus with people on it all day?”
Deciding whether a site is primarily informational and promotional or set up to handle eCommerce transactions is key. Pets.com, said Diskin, had problems because the site’s demographics didn’t match the products — customers would rather buy pet supplies in a store.
“You have to ask yourself first ‘What does my customer want?'” he said. “Not everybody is online. Where is my business coming from?”
Diskin said it is important for business owners to have good, open communications between themselves and their Web vendors (“Do they understand your business?” he asked), and at least a basic knowledge of the terminology that vendors work with (firewall, mirrored site, etc.).
“The technical aspect is something you need to understand,” he said. “It’s not something you have to be able to do, but you need to understand what it does.”
Diskin suggested taking design cues from “offline” business practices.
“Think of how you go through transactions now, and that’s what needs to be on the Web site,” he said.
Once a Web site is “up,” it’s important to remember “it’s not finished, ever,” Diskin said. “It’s an investment, not an expense. It’s a part of your business. It doesn’t stop after you’re finished with your first launch.”
New technology presents new considerations regarding our privacy rights, according to Julia Gladstone, Esq., an assistant professor of legal studies at Bryant College, who discussed issues of privacy in relation to the Internet.
Two of Gladstone’s examples:
- Unbeknownst to them, each of the 71,000 spectators at the 2001 Super Bowl had a picture taken, to be compared to those of criminals.
- Using keywords, a program called FBI Carnivore intercepts information from the e-mails of criminals at the rate of one million e-mails per second.
“How invasive is it?” Gladstone said. “Do we care? There is a balance in the U.S. between freedom of expression versus your privacy right. Because of this tension, the U.S. is behind other countries in terms of right to privacy.”
Another prominent privacy issue is the use of “cookies” by many Web sites. Cookies are small text files placed on your computer’s hard drive to collect information about your activity on the site. Thus, Web pages can be customized according to user preferences, based on stored information on what a user did on the last visit to a site. Cookies are what enable consumers to use an online “shopping cart” to make purchases. Most users are unaware that cookies are being placed on their computers.
Gladstone said a big part of the problem is that our country’s boundaries regarding right to privacy are sectoral, not national.
“Industries have their own guidelines,” she said. “There are no direct laws.”
There have been, however, attempts at self-regulation, Gladstone said. The Federal Trade Commission has a privacy policy with which sites may choose to comply, and the Better Business Bureau Online has a privacy seal program, which helps Web users identify companies that honor their privacy policies.
Another method, according to Gladstone, is through technology fighting technology. Through P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences), privacy policies are embedded in the code of a Web site. Browsers will read the policy and automatically provide certain information to specific sites based on preferences set by the users.
Gladstone said there is also software that “turns off” cookies, and lets the user know what sites have attempted to place a cookie.
