Website Operators Research Articles

Discriminatory Housing Advertisements On-Line: Lessons from Craigslist

The Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to publish discriminatory housing advertisements. This has long been applied to newspapers, which have effectively screened all discriminatory housing ads from sight. However, in 1996 Congress created a loophole when it immunized website operators from liability for the content posted to their sites by third parties. Without publisher liability, websites have no incentive to screen out discriminatory housing ads. The result is that such ads are proliferating in cyberspace. While this situation is problematic from a fair housing standpoint, it presents a valuable opportunity. For the first time in a generation discriminatory housing advertisements are out in the open and available for analysis. This article contains a comprehensive review of discriminatory housing ads appearing on the popular website craigslist, which yields a number of interesting findings, including: (1) The vast majority of those who post discriminatory on-line advertisements for housing are placed by people seeking roommates. (2) The overwhelming majority of problematic ads discriminate on the basis of familial status. There are very few that discriminate based on race, ethnicity, or religion. (3) The few roommate ads that do mention race, ethnicity, or religion are more likely to discriminate in favor of minority groups. Thus, they appear more as expressions of individual diversity of backgrounds and beliefs than exclusionary tools of a majoritarian power structure. This information can and should inform changes to the legislative and enforcement regime for dealing with discriminatory housing advertisements. For example, we should recognize that the roommate relationship is different from traditional rental housing, and accord roommate-seekers protection from the law – protection which is currently given to small landlords (who arguably do not need it) but not co-lessees. Fair housing advocates also must address the unique problems presented by familial status as a protected category, both in terms of public awareness and acceptance of the law.

Filling a Protection 'Gap': An Emerging Role for Data Protection in Vindicating the Right to Reputation

Defamation law has traditionally occupied a position of overwhelming dominance in the vindication of the right to reputation. Nevertheless, liberalization of this legal framework including through the Defamation Act 2013 has led to a concern that, when analysed from a fundamental rights perspective, “gaps” in the protection provided for natural persons may have emerged. In this new context, there has been a renewed focus on whether data protection may fill the potential lacunae. Data protection law contains a number of important limitations and exceptions and its jurisprudence has been both limited and sometimes confused. Nevertheless, this article argues that its broad purpose and complex structure ensure it will play a significantly augmented role in the future, especially in actions against website operators facilitating the dissemination of information posted by a third party, the publication of opinion or where either injunctive relief or the correction of inaccurate information is sought (in particular in cases of continuing online disclosure).

Effects of inertia and satisfaction in female online shoppers on repeat‐purchase intention

PurposeWith the prevalence of the internet, whether various interactive relationship building between online channel and consumers may lead or not to profit has been paid much attention by researchers and practitioners. It is also to note that the ratio of female shoppers online has been increasing, and female shoppers now outnumber male shoppers online. Based on the perspective of switching path analysis technique (SPAT), the aim of this study is to explore the effects of consumer inertia and satisfaction on repeat‐purchase intention among female online shoppers, and also to examine whether positive word‐of‐mouth and alternative attraction moderate the above relationships.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from a self‐developed online survey system. The formal questionnaire consisted of three sections. The first section screened participants by gender and online shopping experience. The second section measured respondent perceptions of each construct in the research model. The last section aimed to understand respondent basic personal data.FindingsThe study results indicate that both consumer inertia and satisfaction positively influence repeat‐purchase intention, and that consumer inertia is more influential than satisfaction; moreover, positive word‐of‐mouth negatively moderates the relationship between consumer inertia and repeat‐purchase intention, but positively moderates that between satisfaction and repeat‐purchase intention; finally, alternative attraction does not moderate any of the above relationships significantly.Originality/valueTo the authors’ knowledge, the difference between the direct effect of inertia and satisfaction on purchasing behavior has not been investigated. Based on the study findings, suggestions are made for shopping website operators.

Permission email messages significantly increase gambler retention

Online gambling providers require customers to allow email messages from the provider. This requirement provides gambling marketers an inexpensive and potent medium to encourage frequent gambling, higher bets, and other potentially harmful behaviors that may lead to problem gambling. An online casino was developed in 2000 to collect data on online gamblers' actual gambling behavior after receiving persuasive permission email messages. Data were collected over a 36day period. One of five permission email messages in an online gambling experiment had a significant and large effect in increasing expected gambler retention by an average 20days. Increasing the length of play is a primary objective of gambling venue owners who often use CRM programs and permission email marketing to increase revenues. This finding adds knowledge to the possible promotional strategies that extends a gambler's lifetime value with an online betting company, offering a competitive advantage to gambling website operators.

Rethinking Shevill. Conceptualising the EU private international law of Internet torts against personality rights

Neither EU nor Member States’ legislators or courts have to date found satisfying answers to the legal challenges of transnational violations of personality rights, such as reputation or privacy, in cyberspace. These challenges involve in particular the interpretation of EU private international law rules governing jurisdiction. Due to the Internet's ubiquitous character, applying the ECJ's Shevill doctrine from 1995 to transnational violations of personality rights in cyberspace would lead to limitless jurisdiction, thereby causing the risk of severe chilling effects on online publications. If behaving in a prudent and precautionary manner, website operators would have to adjust to the standards of the most restrictive jurisdiction. In its decision eDate Advertising and Martinez v MGN (Cases C-509/09 and C-161/10), the CJEU amended the Shevill doctrine by establishing a ‘centre of interests’ criterion. The article will argue that although the introduction of the ‘centre of interests’ test is to be appreciated, it is insufficient to merely amend Shevill; rather, the ‘centre of interests’ criterion should replace the existing Shevill ‘mosaic principle’.

Is Poker a Game of Skill or Chance? A Quasi-Experimental Study

Due to intensive marketing and the rapid growth of online gambling, poker currently enjoys great popularity among large sections of the population. Although poker is legally a game of chance in most countries, some (particularly operators of private poker web sites) argue that it should be regarded as a game of skill or sport because the outcome of the game primarily depends on individual aptitude and skill. The available findings indicate that skill plays a meaningful role; however, serious methodological weaknesses and the absence of reliable information regarding the relative importance of chance and skill considerably limit the validity of extant research. Adopting a quasi-experimental approach, the present study examined the extent to which the influence of poker playing skill was more important than card distribution. Three average players and three experts sat down at a six-player table and played 60 computer-based hands of the poker variant "Texas Hold'em" for money. In each hand, one of the average players and one expert received (a) better-than-average cards (winner's box), (b) average cards (neutral box) and (c) worse-than-average cards (loser's box). The standardized manipulation of the card distribution controlled the factor of chance to determine differences in performance between the average and expert groups. Overall, 150 individuals participated in a "fixed-limit" game variant, and 150 individuals participated in a "no-limit" game variant. ANOVA results showed that experts did not outperform average players in terms of final cash balance. Rather, card distribution was the decisive factor for successful poker playing. However, expert players were better able to minimize losses when confronted with disadvantageous conditions (i.e., worse-than-average cards). No significant differences were observed between the game variants. Furthermore, supplementary analyses confirm differential game-related actions dependent on the card distribution, player status, and game variant. In conclusion, the study findings indicate that poker should be regarded as a game of chance, at least under certain basic conditions, and suggest new directions for further research.

The influence of learning and updating speed on the growth of commercial websites

In this paper, we study the competition model of commercial websites with learning and updating speed, and further analyze the influence of learning and updating speed on the growth of commercial websites from a nonlinear dynamics perspective. Using the center manifold theory and the normal form method, we give the explicit formulas determining the stability and periodic fluctuation of commercial sites. Numerical simulations reveal that sites periodically fluctuate as the speed of learning and updating crosses one threshold. The study provides reference and evidence for website operators to make decisions.

“I Threw a Party and Million People Showed Up”: A Website Owner and Operator as Model for New Literacies Teaching

“I Threw a Party and Million People Showed Up”: A Website Owner and Operator as Model for New Literacies Teaching

Overseas Website Operators Beware? – The International Reach of the UK Defamation Laws

Overseas Website Operators Beware? – The International Reach of the UK Defamation Laws

Examining online consumers’ behavior: A service-oriented view

Retailers’ websites are an important interface between retailers and their customers. The various features and elements that retailers include on their websites play a critical role in attracting customers and ensuring their satisfaction with the online shopping process. By conducting a three-phased study, we identify how the elements of a website shape customers’ salient beliefs. These salient beliefs, in turn, determine the level of customers’ satisfaction with the website. This study provides both theoretical insights into the beliefs of online shoppers and practical insights for retail website operators. Specifically, we argue that when retail websites are constructed to include several specific elements that appeal to the key salient beliefs of information quality, service quality, and system quality, retailers will increase customers’ satisfaction with the online shopping process.

An overview of EU data protection rules on use of data collected online

In the third of our series of articles considering the EU’s limited harmonisation of the laws regulating the activities of businesses using the Internet, we look at EU rules on the use of data collected online. We consider the principles governing the processing of personal data collected online. We then discuss the new rules on the use of cookies and the practical difficulties facing website operators in complying with them and conclude with a brief overview of the rules governing the transfer of personal data outside the EEA.

Privacy policies and national culture on the internet

The Web today enables consumers and vendors to conduct business almost without regard to physical location. However, this does not mean that all barriers are removed; culturally-based assumptions about the behavior of the other party can lead to major misunderstandings. We study the differences in privacy-sensitive decisions made by website operators (which can be expected to vary between cultures) as one particular example of these differing assumptions. In particular, we seek to understand whether new norms of behavior may be emerging as online vendors recognize the damage privacy invasions do to consumers' trust. We present a large-scale empirical study of privacy-sensitive actions across cultures on the Internet. Our study is based on an automated analysis of P3P documents posted on the 100,000 most popular websites. We find that the adoption of P3P, as well as specific company policies, vary across cultural dimensions. The analysis also suggests that discrepancies exist between concerns for information privacy and the adoption of privacy enhancing technologies within a culture.

Why parents help their children lie to Facebook about age: Unintended consequences of the ‘Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act’

Facebook, like many communication services and social media sites, uses its Terms of Service (ToS) to forbid children under the age of 13 from creating an account. Such prohibitions are not uncommon in response to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which seeks to empower parents by requiring commercial Web site operators to obtain parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. Given economic costs, social concerns, and technical issues, most general–purpose sites opt to restrict underage access through their ToS. Yet in spite of such restrictions, research suggests that millions of underage users circumvent this rule and sign up for accounts on Facebook. Given strong evidence of parental concern about children’s online activity, this raises questions of whether or not parents understand ToS restrictions for children, how they view children’s practices of circumventing age restrictions, and how they feel about children’s access being regulated. In this paper, we provide survey data that show that many parents know that their underage children are on Facebook in violation of the site’s restrictions and that they are often complicit in helping their children join the site. Our data suggest that, by creating a context in which companies choose to restrict access to children, COPPA inadvertently undermines parents’ ability to make choices and protect their children’s data. Our data have significant implications for policy–makers, particularly in light of ongoing discussions surrounding COPPA and other age–based privacy laws.

Crawlers in our life

The life blood of science is information. Information we create and build upon, apply, store, recall, teach and use to build the most objective development of our scientific field of interest. The Internet naturally has come to be an important part of this mission. This Utopian view is not without complications as we come to see with development of the Internet in orthodontics. Recently I was obliged to become acquainted with Web crawlers. Web Crawlers are automated computer programs that systematically browse the Web. They survey Web sites and index the information by links tags, key words, etc. Probably every time you use a search engine, you are using the results of somebody’s Web crawler. Many referrals to our site at Angle.org come from search engines and not directly by typing in our URL, http://angle.org. You may think so what. Well these rascals recently crawled into my life and I was surprised. It seems that many firms want to have their own search engines and one way to do this is to use a Web crawler to systematically regularly survey the sites of interest on the Web and copy what they want onto their server. Why do organizations and people do this? There are very legitimate uses of Web crawlers, but there are also less constructive applications. When their server becomes the supplier of the information to a search, they can control what is displayed including what is omitted and the priority of one item over another. This raises the question, how is the priority of items displayed determined? There is not only the potential for money to be involved here, think of the censorship possibilities and how political and other bodies could control what people see who use their servers. With this background, how does this affect orthodontic literature? If you type impacted canine into your search engine, and it goes to their server, the server determines which articles from which web sites you see and in what order they are presented to you. I always viewed this as a wonderful tool and work saver. Now I am less comfortable that I am seeing everything available without bias. The precipitating factor here for me was when I wanted to determine the number of hits on our web site. Originally, we reported the hits as reported by Counter, the agreed official measure. These clearly were real hits, but my web site operator explained to me that in recent years the development of web crawlers has grown and now many of these hits came from Web crawlers systematically and regularly searching our site. For the last 10 years, our long standing policy has been to make science freely available to everyone on the Internet. However, our Open Access gave free reign not only to you, but to the crawlers also. Last October we adopted a new platform with protection against Web crawlers. Now when I count our hits it is obvious that more recently activities such as crawlers were producing at least half of the hits on our web site. How much are these hits ultimately leading to proper use of the information is impossible to determine. It’s a sort of cold war with the people who would take our information for other purposes than we intended. They set up new approaches and these are countered by our people. Clearly the dichotomy between Open Access for the good of the patient and those who wants to control or generate revenue will continue to be out of sync. This whole world is experiencing the same thing because most journals and sites want advertising revenues to support the operation of their site. Advertisers want to know what they are buying and this is determined by the traffic at your site. This has been measured by hits with research that shows some percentage of the total traffic at your site end up as users who generate revenue for the advertiser. The problem with counting hits accurately is, therefore, critical and this makes the flow of advertising dollars from the printed pages to the Internet lower and slower. We are small potatoes in this picture. Financing the sites on the Web is at the core of the paradigm shift from printed material to the digital world.

EU law requirements to provide information to website visitors

This is the first of a planned series of articles considering the EU’s limited harmonisation of the laws regulating the activities of businesses using the Internet. This first article considers five key EU directives, all of which require website operators to provide a variety of information to website visitors. We consider the circumstances in which the various requirements apply and the information that must be provided, to simplify the process of navigating through rules which, although similar in nature, arise from disparate sources. We consider data privacy and “ePrivacy” rules; consumer protection rules arising in the field of e-commerce; and rules protecting potential creditors dealing over the Internet with limited liability companies.

Browser Security: Lessons from Google Chrome

The Web has become one of the primary ways people interact with their computers, connecting people with a diverse landscape of content, services, and applications. Users can find new and interesting content on the Web easily, but this presents a security challenge: malicious Web-site operators can attack users through their Web browsers. Browsers face the challenge of keeping their users safe while providing a rich platform for Web applications.

Optimal inventory and dynamic admission policies for a retailer of seasonal products with affiliate programs and drop‐shipping

AbstractThis article investigates the optimal inventory and admission policies for a “Clicks‐and‐Bricks” retailer of seasonal products that, in addition to selling through its own physical and online stores, also sells through third‐party websites by means of affiliate programs. Through postings on partners' webpages, an affiliate program allows a retailer to attract customers who would otherwise be missed. However, this retailer needs to pay a commission for each sale that originates from the website operators participating in the program. The retailer may also refer online orders to other sources (such as distributors and manufacturers) for fulfillment through a drop‐shipping agreement and thus earns commissions. This would be an option when, for example, the inventories at the physical stores were running low. Therefore, during the selling horizon, the retailer needs to dynamically control the opening/closing of affiliate programs and decide on the fulfillment option for online orders. On the basis of a discrete‐time dynamic programming model, the optimal admission policy of the retailer is investigated in this paper, and the structural properties of the revenue function are characterized. Numerical examples are given to show the revenue impact of optimal admission control. The optimal initial stocking decisions at the physical stores are also studied. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009

What Californians Understand about Privacy Online

The volume of online commerce grows every year, in absence of a federal law setting baseline protections for the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information. Instead, information collected by websites are governed by individual policies.In order to gauge Californians' understanding of policies and default rules in the online environment, we commissioned a representative survey of adults in the State (N=991). The telephonic survey of Spanish and English speakers was conducted by the Survey Research Center of University of California, Berkeley.A gulf exists between California consumers' understanding of online rules and common business practices. For instance, Californians who shop online believe that policies prohibit third-party information sharing. A majority of Californians believes that policies create the right to require a website to delete personal information upon request, a general right to sue for damages, a right to be informed of security breaches, a right to assistance if identity theft occurs, and a right to access and correct data.These findings show that California consumers overvalue the mere fact that a website has a policy, and assume that websites carrying the label have strong, default rules to protect personal data. In a way, consumers interpret privacy policy as a quality seal that denotes adherence to some set of standards. Website operators have little incentive to correct this misperception, thus limiting the ability of the market to produce outcomes consistent with consumers' expectations. Drawing upon earlier work, we conclude that because the term privacy policy has taken on a specific meaning in the minds of consumers, its use should be limited to contexts where businesses provide a set of protections that meet consumers' expectations.

The Communications Decency Act of 1996: Why § 230 is Outdated and Publisher Liability for Defamation Should be Reinstated Against Internet Service Providers

When Congress enacted § 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("CDA")1 it changed the landscape of defamation law on the Internet. In the eleven years since Congress passed § 230, courts have interpreted it broadly, giving seemingly complete immunity to internet service providers ("ISPs") and website operators in third-party claims for defamation committed on the Internet.2 This essay argues that today, with the Internet being the dominant medium that it is, the CDA is outdated and unfair, and should be amended or repealed in favor of the common law framework for publisher liability in defamation.3

Multiple-resource request scheduling for differentiated QoS at website gateway

Differentiated quality of service is a way for a website operator to provide different service levels to its clients. Traditional HTTP request scheduling schemes can achieve this, but they schedule requests to manage only one server resource, such as CPU or disk I/O. Actually, processing a request on the server will consume multiple resources. This paper presents a multiple-resource request scheduling algorithm, called mQoS, for differentiating the utilization of the server resource. The mQoS scheduler consists of several sub-schedulers and a main scheduler. Each sub-scheduler manages a server resource to differentiate its utilization among the classes. The main scheduler checks the availability of every server resource and triggers an appropriate sub-scheduler to balance the utilization of server resources. The implementation of the mQoS gateway is based on Squid and Linux. The evaluation compares the mQoS scheduling with no scheduling (nQoS) and single-resource request scheduling (sQoS). The mQoS scheduling reveals the accurate differentiation on every server resource. In addition, the total server throughput in the mQoS scheduling is improved by 21%, compared with the sQoS scheduling. The average user-perceived latency of the mQoS scheduling is also shorter than other scheduling.