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more about the competitive environment that would infuse or impede technological progress, whether firms can control the level of technology in their processes and to what extent, the role of channel partners in the use of technology, and accommodating differences in technology across countries into firm processes.
• Knowledge management – Users are constantly learning and adopting newer technology. This
calls for more understanding related to technology transfer between national borders, co-creation of new technology for multiple markets, new patterns of offshore outsourcing, and the management of global trading partners.
Privacy & Ethics. The DME brings together rms and customers for various business and social purposes.
In doing so, the concept of identity becomes a crucial point to note. Whereas personal identity pertains to pursuits that set a person apart from referent others, social identity indicates the pursuits that associate a person with referent others (de Ruyter and van Laer 2014). In the DME environment, this translates to members of fan pages on Facebook and user forums. When this social identity is violated, as is commonly the case, it results in social, nancial, material, and even personal harm. In such a situation, protecting one’s identity is not only viewed as a basic right, but also the ethical way to interact in the digital world.
What we know: The most basic of privacy and ethical concerns relate to the collection and use of online data (Caudill and Murphy 2000). For instance, tools such as cookies, spyware, adware and online forms can covertly capture a broader, richer set of data
at a lower cost than traditional forms of customer surveillance. As a result, privacy has consistently been identi ed as a chief concern of Internet users (Palmer 2005). Privacy attacks regarding data are of two types – identity disclosure and attribute disclosure. While identity disclosure occurs when the offender is able
to determine the mapping from a record to a speci c real-world entity (e.g. an individual), attribute disclosure occurs when the offender is able to determine the value of a user attribute (e.g. association to a cause) that the user intended to keep private (Li et al. 2007) 2007 (ICDE 2007. Typically, identity disclosure leads
to attribute disclosure that results in individual harm. Based on the identity and attributes, attacks can occur (a) at random without targeting any speci c individual, (b) to speci c individual(s) using links such as common characteristics, (c) to whole groups targeting a speci c interest, and (d) using links and groups targeting one or many individuals (Zheleva and Getoor 2009).
While data collection concerns stem mainly from users, data breach is a privacy concern that impacts rms and users. The cyber-attack on Anthem Inc. insurance customers in February 2015 impacted nearly 80 million customers by compromising their personal information (Mathews and Yadron 2015). To protect such breaches, privacy literature lists two mechanisms – interactive and non-interactive. In the interactive mechanism,
an offender would pose queries to the breached database only to get noisy results. In the non-interactive mechanism, a data provider releases an anonymized version of the database to meet privacy concerns(Dwork 2006). Despite such mechanisms, offenders continue to nd newer ways to compromise personal data.
What we would like to know: To better safeguard our information, it is important for us to know more about:
• Privacy infrastructure – It is no secret that firms collect information for marketing activities. Even though they establish security features for the information, data breaches occur. The reasons for such breaches range from offender expertise to ineffective security settings to human error. In light of these occurrences, is it possible to create a commonly-accepted privacy-rights management setup that upholds all data collecting entities to the same regulations? In other words, is
it possible to create a framework such as the HIPAA (federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) that protect the confidentiality and security of healthcare information? Further while doing so, can we create a system that does not add any undue cost burden on the complying entities?
• Monetizing data – As an extension to the earlier point, is it possible to create a commonly-accepted framework that would bring in transparency into firms’ efforts in monetizing anonymized customer data? What measures would have to be taken to ensure such a setup is in place?
• Protecting information – Just as firms must seek a better way to protect customer data, is it possible for the users also to have an easy-to-use format to store and retrieve their personal information that is safe from hackers?
Conclusion
The DME has demonstrated immense promise as
an integrator, facilitator, and enhancer of interaction between and across rms and customers. Despite the regular introduction of new mediums of interactive platforms, the environment is accommodative of
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