Investigating the relationship between internet privacy concerns and online purchase behavior

Many organizations now emphasize the use of technology that can help them get closer to consumers and build ongoing relationships with them. The ability to compile consumer data profiles has been made even easier with Internet technology. However, it is often assumed that consumers like to believe they can trust a company with their personal details. Lack of trust may cause consumers to have privacy concerns. Addressing such privacy concerns may therefore be crucial to creating stable and ultimately profitable customer relationships. Three specific privacy concerns that have been frequently identified as being of importance to consumers include unauthorized secondary use of data, invasion of privacy, and errors. Results of a survey study indicate that both errors and invasion of privacy have a significant inverse relationship with online purchase behavior. Unauthorized use of secondary data appears to have little impact. Managerial implications include the careful selection of communication channels for maximum impact, the maintenance of discrete “permission-based” contact with consumers, and accurate recording and handling of data.

No-switching quantum key distribution using broadband modulated coherent light

We realize an end-to-end no-switching quantum key distribution protocol using continuous-wave coherent light. We encode weak broadband Gaussian modulations onto the amplitude and phase quadratures of light beams. Our no-switching protocol achieves high secret key rate via a post-selection protocol that utilizes both quadrature information simultaneously. We establish a secret key rate of 25 Mbits/s for a lossless channel and 1 kbit/s for 90% channel loss, per 17 MHz of detected bandwidth, assuming individual Gaussian eavesdropping attacks. Since our scheme is truly broadband, it can potentially deliver orders of magnitude higher key rates by extending the encoding bandwidth with higher-end telecommunication technology.

Doubling daily inhaled corticosteroid dose is ineffective in mild to moderately severe attacks of asthma in adults

Background: Asthma guidelines recommend increasing or doubling inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) dose to treat mild and moderate exacerbations of asthma in adults. Aim: To: (i) compare the effectiveness of doubling existing daily ICS dose (fluticasone) with maintaining usual ICS dose and usual daily ICS dose accompanied by oral steroids (OS) (dexamethasone) during mild and moderately severe exacerbations of asthma in adults; (ii) examine determinants of success and failure; and (iii) compare side-effect profiles. Methods: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled (double-dummy), triple crossover trial. Participants acted as their own control. Outcome measures included treatment success/failure, peak expiratory flow (PEF) after 7 days therapy or at treatment failure, and side-effects. Results: From 22 participants (nine males and 13 females), 18 pairs of data were available for maintaining usual ICS versus doubling ICS and doubling ICS versus OS, and 19 for maintaining usual ICS versus OS. Median (fifth-95th percentile) age was 46.5 (32-64) years and forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) 73% (29-97%) predicted. The outcome after doubling ICS was not superior to maintaining usual ICS, with 11 (61%) failures in both arms (P = 0.66). OS, with only 5 (26%) failures, was superior to maintaining usual ICS with 12 (63%) failures (P = 0.04), and to doubling ICS with 5 (28%) versus 11 (61%) failures (P = 0.07). Median PEF (as percentage of run-in best) at end-points were 90.5% (57.1-177.1) for OS, 78.3% (39.5-103.1) for maintaining usual ICS and 77.9 (27.7-110.3) for doubling ICS. Neither gender nor PEF at exacerbation were predictive of failure. Although doubling ICS was not an effective therapy overall, ICS dose at exacerbation were predictive of success in the doubling ICS arm (P = 0.04). Treatment failures when doubling daily ICS dose were more common if achieved fluticasone dose was less than 2000 mu g (three of 11, 73%) compared to 2000 mu g or greater (eight of eight, 37.5%). Increasing age and the presence of an upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) were predictive of failure with OS. Side-effects were more commonly reported with OS (52.6%) than doubling ICS (42.1%) or maintaining usual ICS (19.1%) with the most common being mood changes (36.8%), sleep disturbance (31.6%) and changes in appetite (26.3%). Conclusions: Doubling daily ICS dose per se is not effective for the treatment of mild to moderately severe exacerbations of asthma in adults. Success may depend on achieved ICS dose. Oral steroids are effective, but side-effects are common. A review of current guidelines may be warranted.

National culture, trust and internet privacy concerns

A major inhibitor to e-commerce stems from the reluctance consumers have to complete transactions because of concern over the use of private information divulged in online transaction processing. Because e-commerce occurs in a global environment, cultural factors are likely to have a significant impact on this concern. Building on work done in the area of culture and privacy, and also trust and privacy, we explore the three way relationship between culture, privacy and trust. Better, more appropriate, and contemporary measures of culture have recently been espoused, and a better understanding and articulation of internet users information privacy concern has been developed. We present the results of an exploratory study that builds on the work of Milberg, Gefen, and Bellman to better understand and test the effect that national culture has on trust and internet privacy.

Context obfuscation for privacy via ontological descriptions

Context information is used by pervasive networking and context-aware programs to adapt intelligently to different environments and user tasks. As the context information is potentially sensitive, it is often necessary to provide privacy protection mechanisms for users. These mechanisms are intended to prevent breaches of user privacy through unauthorised context disclosure. To be effective, such mechanisms should not only support user specified context disclosure rules, but also the disclosure of context at different granularities. In this paper we describe a new obfuscation mechanism that can adjust the granularity of different types of context information to meet disclosure requirements stated by the owner of the context information. These requirements are specified using a preference model we developed previously and have since extended to provide granularity control. The obfuscation process is supported by our novel use of ontological descriptions that capture the granularity relationship between instances of an object type.

Formal verification of type flaw attacks in security protocols

Security protocols are often modelled at a high level of abstraction, potentially overlooking implementation-dependent vulnerabilities. Here we use the Z specification language's rich set of data structures to formally model potentially ambiguous messages that may be exploited in a 'type flaw' attack. We then show how to formally verify whether or not such an attack is actually possible in a particular protocol using Z's schema calculus.