QotW5: “Online Identity” in The Virtual Auction Community

Introduction

Each of us has our own identity due to the differences in our capabilities, our characteristics, and our personalities. Identity has been essential in our physical world as it helps us understand the person that we communicate. Is identity still significant in the virtual world since identity turns out to be more ambiguous? Who are “SweettieKay, Devilking, and Jaybott”? How do these virtual identities interact in online community? Identity, in fact, has even become more important in the development of virtual community as it helps us assess the reliability of information and trustworthiness of people whom we interact especially in the online auction community, in which trust is the key to its success (Donath, 1996).

Mentioning about online auction, immediately we will think of eBay, the world’s largest online auction and shopping website. Developed in September 3, 1995 as AuctionWeb by Pierre Omidyar, a computer programmer, Ebay now has become the leading virtual marketplaces where both individuals and businesses can sell goods and services worldwide with over 200 million registered users (Wikipedia, 2007). Simply with a valid email address, anyone can register to be eBay’s users and choose to remain anonymous on the site. Thus, users on eBay are often recognized by others through their online pseudonyms or eBay user IDs as seen in the picture below.

A “Peer Reputation”

Everyday millions of items are sold on eBay through fixed-price trading and mainly auction It usually starts first with the seller listing an item he wants to sell, choosing the category for the item, proving a brief and clear description on the item including both text and photos, setting the starting bid that may contain a reverse price option (the minimum price that seller accepts for his or her item), determining the payment and shipping methods and choosing a closing date/time for the auction. Once the sale item is posted, buyers will begin bidding up for the item till the closing time. The winning bidder will send payments to the seller who, in turn, will send the item to him. Here, the risk of selling without payment or of paying with low quality begins to arise.

To address this risk, eBay has included an online feedback system or “peer reputation” where both the seller and buyer can rate each other according to “helpfulness and honesty” by leaving a positive, negative, or neutral feedback with a short comment after they have completed their trade (Masum & Zhang, 2003). For each positive feedback, the member will receive 1 score and similarly, the member will obtain a deduction of 1 score for each negative feedback received. However, the neutral feedback will have no impact on the member. In addition, each member can only increase or decrease other member’s rating by 1 score no matter how many transactions they share (eBay, 2007). Automatically, eBay will combine all of these ratings into each member’s profiles permanently, which prospective buyers can review by clicking on seller’s eBay ID as seen above in the typical seller’s profile. This feedback system has not only fostered trust among traders but also provided a great benefit to each user on eBay through shared trade experiences (Masum & Zhang, 2003).

The Crack for Identity Theft on eBay

With the emergence of newly advanced technologies, identity theft has become a major concern today in eBay leaving many users to be shocked after knowing that someone has used their eBay identities to purchase goods online or has changed their passwords without their consent. For example, in 2004, Mr. Donald Jay Alots found out that someone has used his eBay to purchase several thousand dollars worth of electronics while he was in the hospital at that time (Austen, 2005).

In fact, there are two main ways through which identity theft can take place on eBay. First, identity hijackers can steal passwords from infrequent users on eBay by scanning through eBay website to look for these users and entering a series of random password (Pursglove, 2002). Second, they can begin phishing by sending out a scam email to eBay users and redirect users to a “bogus web page” or a “forged” eBay website asking users for their ID, password, credit card information, bank account numbers, and personal information (Loe, 2007). For instance, as seen in the below picture, the address bar below "http://billing0nline.biz/updates/" actually has no relation with eBay at all rather than a bogus eBay web page (Identity Theft Resolution Center, 2007).

More importantly, once users click “continue”, they will arrive at the “bogus web page” while their information will be transferred mechanically to the identity thieves by a form processing service operated by ssl.powered.com (MillerSmiles, 2003). According to Ian Austen on the New York Times, March 7, 2005, the vulnerability of phishing actually arose from the company’s domination of online auction business and its heavy reliance on e-mail communication.

Conclusion

As ambiguity increased within virtual world, online identity has taken a key role in the development of online auction community. In fact, it is through peer reputation that enables users to build trust and share experience in the online auction community. More importantly, with the major concern of identity theft today related to the prevalent of phishing, a strong cooperation between the company and the users is essential to the mitigation of identity theft.

References

Austen, I. (2005, March 7). On eBay, e-mail phishers find a well-stocked pond. Technology. The New York Times. Retrieved 10:00 February 19, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/07/technology/07ebay.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5090&en=961346a7f16ccb24&ex=1267851600

Donath, Judith S. (1996). Identity and deception in the virtual community. MIT Media Lab. Retrieved 9:00 February 18, 2007 from http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html

eBay Inc. (2007). Evaluating a member’s reputation. Retrieved Retrieved 13:15 February 18, 2007 from http://pages.ebay.com/help/feedback/evaluating-feedback.html

Loe, I. (2007, February 12). Phishing, pharming, and the latest potholes on the information highway.

Mainelli, T. (2002, February 18). eBay identity theft hits close to home. CNN/Sci-Tech. A Time Warner Company. Retrieved 17:00 February 18, 2007 from http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/02/18/ebay.identity.theft.idg/index.html

Masum, H. & Zhang, Yi C. (2003). Manifesto for the reputation society. Retrieved 14:00 February 18, 2007 from http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue9_7/masum/

MillersSmiles (2003, October 3). eBay security measures email hoax and web page scam. Tam Digital. Retrieved 21:00 February 18, 2007 from http://www.millersmiles.co.uk/identitytheft/100303a-ebay-spoof.htm

Wikipedia. (2007). eBay. Retrieved 22:10 February 18, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay

Images

Identity Theft Resolution Center. (2007). New eBay phishing scam. Retrieved 15:00 February 20, 2007 from http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.identitytheft911-sunj.com/content.do%3Fsp%3D55&imgrefurl=http://www.identitytheft911-sunj.com/alerts/alert.ext%3Fsp%3D64&h=261&w=350&sz=52&hl=en&sig2=1TfGuKDn-maMA2WCbhS0XQ&start=14&tbnid=KkFdu2qJwTbfRM:&tbnh=89&tbnw=120&ei=lyXbRaDfMKDaJO77qZ0J&prev=/images%3Fq%3Didentity%2Btheft%2Bin%2BeBay%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26rls%3DGGGL,GGGL:2006-46,GGGL:en%26sa%3DG

QotW4: Internet Economies and You...

The Gift Economy - Wikipedia


What would happen if the existing Net did not exist? Where would we obtain the information needed for our research? How can we communicate with others outside our countries? Obviously, Internet has become an essential part of our lives particularly with the creation of “gift economy” in the virtual community as it enables us not only to collect information but also to contribute our knowledge to the public’s wealth through our collaboration with other people from various parts of the world. In fact, according to Rheingold in 1993, the “gift economy” is an exchange of “help and information” without an explicit agreement upon a quid pro quo or a favor for a favor (Kollock, 1999). More importantly, the gift economy has also brought us three major benefits: reductions in production cost, provisions of public good, and improvement of production function (Kollock, 1999). Indeed, one of the most successful “gift economies” that we inherit in society today is Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia.


The Development of Wikipedia

To create a more open encyclopedia complimentary to Nupeida, an old existing free online encyclopedia written by experts and reviewed through a formal process, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, both founders of WikiMedia Foundations, began to develop Wikipedia in 2001 on its own domain http://www.wikipedia.com/. In fact, a major philosophy behind is that an open collaboration among well-meaning informed editors will gradually improve the encyclopedia in its “breadth, depth, and accuracy” to maintain its timeliness (Wikipedia, 2006). Especially, till today, Wikipedia has included up to 1.6 million articles with 250 different languages increasing from 1,627,522 articles and the only language, English in 2001, making it one of the largest encyclopedias in the world nowadays (Wikipedia, 2006).


The Formation of a Collaborative Community

As its name suggests, wiki - “a collaborative website” and pedia - “encyclopedia”, wikipedia is built as an open source encyclopedia that promotes the cooperation of thousands of people in the public with one same purpose to create, share, and distribute information at zero cost. Moreover, most of the contributions from editors in Wikipedia are protected by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), one of the major copyleft licenses. Having the GFDL “as a guarantee of freedom”, is fact, “is a strong motivation to work on a free encyclopedia,” emphasized by Larry Sanger on the corporate website (Wikipedia, 2006). The license permits not only the author retains their copyright on their own works but also others to add on those works and republish it as long as they give credit to the original author (Perens, 1999). Thus, users can freely edit theirs or others’ written articles inside Wikipedia by clicking the “edit page” tab in the article and filling out the changes in the designed layout. Automatically, changes will be recorded and can be viewed later in the “history” tab in the article so others can keep tracks of changes made to the articles. Also, for this reason, Wikipedia has never stated that its articles are “complete” as these articles will be changed and improved constantly over time. This, in fact, has created a major strength for Wikipedia encyclopedia, its timeliness or its ability to update information rapidly.


The Loopholes inside Wikipedia

Not surprisingly, the freedom granted in writing and editing of the article in Wikipedia has raised several important issues in academic research such as the credibility of cited sources, the quality in the content, and the bias of the authors listed on the encyclopedia. In fact, users assist each others not only in their contributions on others’ works but also in the articles reviews such as peer review or good article assessment. This, in fact, has helped to address the problem importantly in ensuring the quality of created articles in the community. Wikipedia’s credibility has improved recently from a study conducted in 2005 by Nature magazine on the comparison of accuracy in two major encyclopedia websites: Encyclopedia Britannica (123 errors) and Wikipedia (162 errors) (Barack, 2007).


More than just an encyclopedia, Wikipedia provides us a true “gift economy” that allows us not only to foster our innovativeness but also to share that knowledge extensively in the virtual community.

References

Barack, L. (2007). Wikipedia's Stock Rises. School Library Journal, 53(1), 24-24. Retrieved 22:10, February 08, 2007 from the Academic Search Premier database.

Kollock, P. (1999). The economies of online cooperation: gifts and public goods in cyberspace Retrieved 21:35, February 07, 2007 from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm

Perens, B. (1999, January). Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Retrieved 22:45, February 07, 2007 from http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/perens.html

Wikipedia. (2007). Wikipedia:About. Retrieved 23:20 , February 08, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Who_writes_Wikipedia.3F

QotW3: Sharing, Copyright, & Creative Culture

The Copyright Dilemma in Digital World

Is digital technology a benefit or detriment today? Evidently, digital technology has given us the ability to obtain a large pool of information easily at low cost as well as to create, modify, and distribute information on a large extent, which once thought to be impossible in the past. This advantage, however, has actually turned out to be a major threat to the balance between the public and private domain in our society nowadays along the increase of piracy, particularly in the entertainment industry. Simply with an Internet access, people can download their favorite song, video, or movie by using peer-to-peer file sharing software such as Kazaa or Morpheus in a few minute without going to the physical music store or even paying any royalties to the creators. This, in fact, has resulted in million of dollars lost in lawsuits on copyright infringement in the U.S. every year. Therefore, in my opinion, instead of controlling the access to and use on copyright work, we should modify copyright law in accordance to changes in the society to maintain the equilibrium of interests between the content creators and the public domain.


Is the Current “Balance” Too Rigid?

Copyright law is the balance between the interest of both the public and the creators with its purpose to advancing the progress of learning and knowledge by promoting the production and distributing “works of authorships” (Litman, 2004, pg. 13). The public benefits from the innovation works from the creators, who then benefit from their creations’ royalties, which provide them incentives to continue their creativity in the society. However, the change of digital technology actually tipped off that balance as it has made easy for creative works from the private domain to distribute freely in the public as Rebecca Martin remarked, “digital technology has blurred the boundaries of artistic ownership” (Catapult, 2007). Responding to the emergence of digital technology, the U.S. Congress has changed the Copyright Act to Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998 to incorporate copyright in the digital world. Furthermore, it also made the U.S. copyright law more restrictive to improve the copyright protection especially with the introduction of Digital Rights Management - DMR, new software developed to control access or uses of a digital work (i312, 2007). However, copyright infringement still increases and spreads widely throughout the country (Lohmann, 2004). In fact, it is true as Howkins has said that piracy rises from the way the law executes in society, “A society where we’re able to download and store ideas, text, images, and sounds, and the way we feel we’re doing something morality, ethically, and socially ok, not something legally illegitimate” (Catapult, 2007).

From Controlling to Sharing through Copyright Licensing

With the widespread of digital technology, controlling access to copyrighted works seems futile in society today. By using the software, DMR, copyright infringement and piracy issue would not be controlled effectively. Moreover, DMR now has created a major risk on the user’s privacy. Thus, in my opinion, instead of putting a brake on the public’s access to and use on the creators’ works, we should provide voluntary copyright to maintain the interests of both the creators and the public good. An example is using copyright license, whish is set up an organization with the approval from the government in different standardized set of regulation. The license will give creators the liberty to set criteria in how they want their public use or modify their works. Besides, this also provides the public opportunities to contribute ideas on creator’s original works because the spread and development of creative work in society depend not only on the creators but also the public at large. Indeed, this idea has been launched and implemented gradually in society over the past few years like Creative Commons (CC).

Creative Commons was a non-profit organization that is started by Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford Law School along with other lawyers at Stanford in 2001 with the purpose to provide the public with high-quality legal licenses and instructions on their use (Kelty, 2005). Creative Commons set out a standard set of copyright licenses so that artists can easily grant limited rights distributors or public users and specify conditions through a voluntary “some rights reserve” approach (ComputerWorld, 2006). In addition, a third party may use the work legitimately without having to contact the creators for permission. Creative Commons are also applicable both for the online and offline works with a notification “This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License”. Today, Creative Commons have received a wide application not only in the U.S. but also all over the world. Till 2005, Creative Commons has provided licenses for 26 countries (Kay Russell, 2006).

In conclusion, in a rapid growth of digital technology, it is hard to control copyright by just using a software application or monetary charges. More importantly, copyright law should be modified constantly with the consideration of changes in economic, technological, and social environment. In fact, during this revolution of digital technology, a flexible copyright law would be essential to preserve the balance of interests between the public and private domain.

References

Carlos Ovalle. (2005). Copyright in Digital Environment. i312 Information in Cyberspace. Retrieved 23:30, January 30, 2007, from http://sentra.ischool.utexas.edu/~i312co/2.php

Catapult. (2007). Remix Culture: A Rights NightMare. Indepth. ABC Online. Retrieved 22:10, January 30, 2007 from http://www.abc.net.au/catapult/indepth/s1645533.htm

Fred von Lohmann. (2004, September 29). Is Suing Your Customers a Good Idea? Retrieved 21:10, February 1, 2007, from http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1095434496352

Jessica Litman. (2004, September 20). Formalities and Default Rules. Sharing and Stealing. Pg. 13. Retrieved 22: 45, February 1, 2007, from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=472141

Kay, Russell. (2006, May 22). Technology - Creative Commons. ComputerWorld. Vol. 40 Issue 21, p34-34, 1p. Retrieved 20:50, February 2, 2007 from http://web.ebscohost.com.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/bsi/pdf?vid=59&hid=121&sid=126b7e6d-eb68-4273-981d-0ffba90848e6%40sessionmgr109

Kelty, Christopher M. (2004). Anthropological Quarterly 77:3:. Retrieved 22:15, February 2, 2007 from http://muse.jhu.edu.libproxy.sim.edu.sg/journals/anthropological_quarterly/v077/77.3kelty02.html

Lawrence Lessig. (2005, October). The Public Domain. Foreign Policy. September/October Issue 150, p48-49, 2p. Retrieved 15:30, February 2, 2007, from http://web.ebscohost.com.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/bsi/pdf?vid=58&hid=121&sid=126b7e6d-eb68-4273-981d-0ffba90848e6%40sessionmgr109