Media watchdogs for e-commerce
by DT - January 31st, 2006 12:47 pm
“Cookies�, we know, are double-edged. They and many more forms of electronic tagging have proliferated throughout our digital communications, and one unavoidable consequence, to many people’s dismay, is the trackability of just about every move we make in today’s digital environment.
It means that Microsoft and AOL can give the government details on websurfers visiting juvenile porn sites (and other information, too, not always evidence of criminal behavior). Google, meanwhile, has tried to resist such cooperation. It also means that the National Security Agency can use the “Echelon� tracking program and others to home in on those of us who might be using suspicious, potentially terrorism-related keywords in our email or phone conversations.
On the more positive side, it’s becoming true that for every development in the internet-frenzied universe, there will doubtless follow an upsurge of watchdogs over that development. The striking transformation of the world’s buying-and-selling life ushered in by eBay has brought its share of fraudulent scams, but it has also encouraged interesting new e-commerce entities whose effect is to closely monitor online auctioneers, and help to correct excesses.
For example a web TV show, AuctionBytes.TV now tracks the world of eBay and its myriad progeny and imitators. It’s part of an originally text-only service, AuctionBytes.com, started in 1999 by Ina Steiner, author of “Turn eBay Data into Dollars� from publishers McGraw Hill, and her husband David Steiner.
The resources of such small business are limited of course. While the Steiners can promise (as their current edition does) a survey of customer discontent with payment methods on eBay, it has been left to Big Media – the New York Times in fact – to do the really heavy lifting in auction scrutiny. With reporter Katie Hafner garnering more than a year’s-worth of detailed information, the Sunday Business section was able to expose the egregious level now achieved in online auctions by old-fashioned chicanery – like phony collectible costume jewelry being passed off on eBay as the real thing, even fake Tiffany stuff.
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