Hello all and welcome to my little piece of the web. I'm Chris, and I study Finance and Marketing here at the University of Delaware. I'll be getting out of here in May, which will sound much better once I have a job lined up. It would be awesome if I could get hooked up with something out in California, but I'll settle for a big city on the east coast. I play basically every sport but my favorite to watch is football. You really can't beat a Sunday during football season, sitting on the couch all day with a table full of snacks then making it to the bars just in time to catch the night game. Needless to say, I miss football already.
The point of this blog, as the title mentions, is to discuss legal and ethical issues related to internet marketing. I know you are thinking to yourself "Wow what a boring topic," but before you click over to ESPN to find out the score of the college basketball game, give the articles a chance. I'm gonna try to make this thing as funny and insightful as I can. Plus these topics really do apply to our every day lives. According to an article in USA TODAY, internet ID theft has more than tripled over the past year. Another major legal concern is taxation of the internet. Many lawmakers want to have a standardized tax on goods regardless of where you buy them. This would suck for people who live in places where there is no sales tax like Delaware. I believe in the next couple years they will end up setting up some type of taxing system for the internet.
There are also many ethical issues that relate to internet marketing. This brings me to the first article I want you to look at. It deals with the internet phone company Skype, and its ability to encrypt phone and text message conversations so well that they are virtually unbreakable. We've been hearing a good deal about wiretapping in the U.S. and we now know that it is commonplace for our government to listen in on calls without a warrant. Skype gives its customers the piece of mind that the phone conversation is truly secure. Realizing this, I think it would be a smart move for the company to start promoting this as a feature in their advertisements. Showing the benefits of the 256 bit "keys" in their encryption software as opposed to the normal 128 keys could convince privacy concerned phone users to switch to Skype. Do you guys think this would be a good marketing tool for them to use? Beyond the yes or no question to that, I was thinking that it might be considered unethical to promote such a service because they would undoubtedly be attracting shady people. Let me know what you think about the whole thing.
- McG
2 Comments:
I think that Skype's internet calling service is a great idea. I don't want to worry about who is listening to my phone conversations-even if I am talking about what I ate for lunch. I think wiretapping is an invasion of privacy and that the 256 bit codes are a great idea-especially for businesses that have offices scattered all over the world. If they are conversing about new products they plan to come out with, the competition could hire some hackers and listen to their conversations....Skype all the way.
I think Skype is a great idea. I still am completely baffled how the government has found yet another way to infringe our rights and listen to phone conversations without warrants but they have and now people have to do something about it. Although I don’t like the idea anymore then the next person about the government listening uninvited to my phone conversations, I’m not sure if I’d need to upgrade to Skype’s service right now. I am not having conversations on my phone that the government should be concerned about listening in on. If they are wasting their time listening to me talk about how much I drank last night let them do it right now as far as I’m concerned. Maybe I’ll worry about investing in the service when I start to get into some real illegal doings.
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