Santa Rosa Business Daily

Ethical and Legal Issues in Electronic Commerce?

Could you highlight the various legal, moral and ethical issues that affect the ability and efficiency of a company to conduct electronic commerce.

Public Comments

1. Electronic commerce could mean that "computers" are responsible for inventory management, placing orders and issuing receipts, but computers cannot be sued for breach of contract. Is it the programmers, system analysts, policy people, or corporate owners who are responsible? To assure security, e-commerce requires strong authentication, based upon credentials that are difficult to forge, otherwise anybody could corrupt the system and have goods mis-delivered for theft. How do we decide when authentication is "good enough" for e-commerce to run unsupervised by humans? How do we recognize forged credentials and where do we turn for the ultimated "trusted authority", such as a "notary", that will accurately vouch for only authorized parties? What is an "electronic signature" under your state laws? How does that affect inter-state commerce when there are different definitions and standards? The list goes on.