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Recently, we pioneered the application of Cherenkov radiation (CR) of radionuclides for the in situ excitation of discrete Eu(III) and Tb(III) complexes. CR is produced by isotopes decaying under emission of charged particles in dielectric media and exhibits a maximum intensity below 400 nm. We have demonstrated that luminescent lanthanide antenna complexes are ideal acceptors for Cherenkov radiation-mediated energy transfer (CRET). Here, we develop and assess peptide-functionalized Tb(III) and Eu(III) complexes in conjunction with CRET excitation by the positron emissive radioisotope (18)F for simultaneous, multiplexed imaging and in vivo optical imaging. This work demonstrates, for the first time, that the detection of the luminescence emission of a discrete Eu(III) complex in vivo is feasible. Our results open possibilities for discrete luminescent lanthanide complexes to be used as diagnostic, optical tools for the intrasurgical guidance of tumor resection.

The oft-cited privacy paradox is the perceived disconnect between individuals’ stated privacy expectations as captured in surveys and consumer market behavior in going online: i.e. individuals purport to value privacy yet still disclose information to firms. The privacy paradox is important for business ethics because the narrative of the privacy paradox defines the scope of corporate responsibility as quite narrow: firms have little to no responsibility to identify or respect privacy expectations if consumers are framed as relinquishing privacy online. The goal of this paper is to test the privacy paradox and empirically examine the conceptualization of privacy post disclosure assumed in the privacy paradox. Contrary to the privacy paradox, the results suggest consumers retain strong privacy expectations even after disclosing information. Privacy violations are valued akin to security violations in creating distrust in firms and in consumer (un)willingness to engage with firms in an experiment. Where firms currently are framed as having, at most, a duty to not interfere with consumers choosing to relinquish privacy, this paper broadens the scope of corporate responsibility to suggest firms have a positive obligation to identify reasonable expectations of privacy of consumers. In addition, the results impact how privacy is conceptualized and empirically examined in business ethics; research perpetuating the privacy paradox through the mistaken framing of disclosure as proof of anti-privacy behavior is harmful by giving license to firms to act contrary to the interests of consumers.

While Big Data has garnered attention for its impact on firms and consumers, the algorithms that make sense of the large data sets are recently in the news – and not only for creating value but for being biased and unfair. Algorithms – including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks – drive critical decisions such as which patient is seen, who is offered insurance, or what street is patrolled by the police. Such algorithmic decisions, like all decisions, are biased and make mistakes. However the question remains, who is responsible for managing those mistakes? What is the appropriate role of algorithms in critical decisions such as being promoted, receiving medical care, or being offered a loan? I turn to focus on the design of ethical algorithms and the responsibility of developers and users of algorithms to ensure algorithms support good decisions. I make two ethical arguments. First, while mistakes may be unintentional, ignoring or even fostering mistakes is unethical –mistakes can diminish rights, cause harms, or be unfair. Ethical algorithms should be designed to be governed by identifying, judging, and correcting mistakes. Second, by creating inscrutable, autonomous algorithms, developers may voluntarily take on accountability for the role of the algorithm in the decision including the ability to correct mistakes.

Big Data combines information from diverse sources to create knowledge, make better predictions and tailor services. This article analyzes Big Data as an industry, not a technology, and identifies the ethical issues it faces. These issues arise from reselling consumers’ data to the secondary market for Big Data. Remedies for the issues are proposed, with the goal of fostering a sustainable Big Data Industry.

With information misuse as a particularly salient form of risk online, respecting privacy is often closely tied to trust in consumer surveys. This study uses factorial vignette survey methodology to measure the relative importance of violating privacy expectations to consumers' trust in a website. The findings suggest consumers find violations of privacy expectations, specifically the secondary uses of information, to diminish trust in a website. Firms that violate privacy expectations are penalized twice: violations of privacy (1) impact trust directly and (2) diminish the importance of trust factors such as integrity and ability on trust. In addition, consumers with greater technology savvy place greater importance on privacy factors than respondents with less knowledge. Violations of privacy may place firms in a downward trust spiral by decreasing not only trust in the website but also the impact of possible mechanisms to rebuild trust such as a firm's integrity and ability.

We report the first targeted nuclear medicine application of the lanthanum radionuclides (132/135)La. These isotopes represent a matched pair for diagnosis via the positron emissions of (132)La and therapy mediated by the Auger electron emissions of (135)La. We identify two effective chelators, known as DO3Apic and macropa, for these radionuclides. The 18-membered macrocycle, macropa, bound (132/135)La with superior molar activity than DO3Apic under similar conditions. These chelators were conjugated to the prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA)-targeting agent DUPA to assess the use of radiolanthanum for in vivo imaging. The (132/135)La-labeled targeted constructs showed high uptake in tumor xenografts expressing PSMA. This study validates the use of these radioactive lanthanum isotopes for imaging applications and motivates future work to assess the therapeutic effects of the Auger electron emissions of (135)La.

Google, Inc. evaluates decisions related to entering the Chinese market, taking their company values and the Chinese government's restrictions on information into consideration.

While privacy online is governed through formal privacy notices, little is known about the impact of privacy notices on trust online. I use a factorial vignette study to examine how the introduction of formal privacy governance (privacy notices) impacts consumer trust and compare the importance of respecting informal privacy norms versus formal privacy notices on consumer trust. The results show that invoking formal privacy notices decreases trust in a website. Further, violating informal privacy norms negatively impacts trust in the website even when the information exchange conforms to or is not mentioned in the privacy notice. The results suggest that respecting privacy norms is key to trust online and challenge the reliance on privacy notices to maintain consumer trust. The consumer, who is the exchange partner most vulnerable to information asymmetries and uncertainty, is not a party to the development of the formal privacy contract and instead relies on informal privacy norms.

Users increasingly use mobile devices to engage in social activity and commerce, enabling new forms of data collection by firms and marketers. User privacy expectations for these new forms of data collection remain unclear. A particularly difficult challenge is meeting expectations for contextual integrity, as user privacy expectations vary depending upon data type collected and context of use. This article illustrates how fine-grained, contextual privacy expectations can be measured. It presents findings from a factorial vignette survey that measured the impact of diverse real-world contexts e.g., medical, navigation, music, data types, and data uses on user privacy expectations. Results demonstrate that individuals’ general privacy preferences are of limited significance for predicting their privacy judgments in specific scenarios. Instead, the results present a nuanced portrait of the relative importance of particular contextual factors and information uses, and demonstrate how those contextual factors can be found and measured. The results also suggest that current common activities of mobile application companies, such as harvesting and reusing location data, images, and contact lists, do not meet users’ privacy expectations. Understanding how user privacy expectations vary according to context, data types, and data uses highlights areas requiring stricter privacy protections by governments and industry.

This paper reports on a set of empirical studies that reveal how people think about location data, how these conceptions relate to expectations of privacy, and, consequently, what this might mean for law, regulation, and technology design. Despite the great debates, published commentary, court action, regulatory activity, and scholarly literature, not enough is known about how people understand location data, and what specifically about location affects people’s judgments about others’ access to their whereabouts. Further, despite efforts to stem location tracking, it remains rampant. Perhaps for the very reasons that people find it abhorrent, the trackers eagerly clutch this revealing window in our lives. Stern rules aimed at curtailing location tracking are a poor match for the ingenuity of seekers of this information who, among other tactics, exploit enormous ambiguity in how location is interpreted and operationalized, to make end runs around these rules. This conceptual ambiguity about location poses challenges even to good faith efforts to regulate location tracking and to represent and enforce it in systems in concert with the ways people conceive, interpret, and value it. In other words, technical and regulatory efforts to protect location privacy may stumble because of a failure to map the meaning that people assign to location with its representations in technical systems. Our studies offer insights into how people think about location data and the factors affecting how we evaluate common location-tracking practices. In so doing these studies may serve the needs of courts, regulators, and systems designers seeking to address diverse challenges without compromising the normative standing of privacy interests in location data. After a series of pilot studies used to test the design of the study, we deployed Knowledge Networks to achieve a nationally representative sample of 1,500 respondents. Using a factorial vignette survey, we asked respondents to rate the appropriateness (a range of ‘Definitely Not OK’ to ‘Definitely OK’) of a series of scenarios, in which contextual elements were systematically varied; these elements included who gathered the location data, how the data was gathered, how long it was stored, and what information was inferred about the subject from the location data. Respondents were placed in one of three conditions determined by vignettes in one of three categories: (1) a baseline category in which they were asked about the collection of location data by different actors, (2) #1 with duration of surveillance added, (3) #2 with inference about the individual included. Our results immediately debunk the idea that people have no expectations of privacy in public. Rather, the findings extend work revealing legitimate privacy interests in erstwhile public locations. The findings reinforce general objections to common practices involving amassing of location data by government and commercial entities, showing that these map onto expressed privacy expectations in systematic and specific ways. Further, the studies reveal that the ways we ask about location in surveys and regulate location in rules makes a difference to how people react. Adding details, such as the duration of collection, the place, and the inferences drawn about the individual decreases the degree to which the vignette are ‘ok.’ The results here show that drawing inferences about an individual's location or identifying the ‘place’ where they are significantly affects how appropriate people judge respective practices to be. This means that tracking an individual's place – home, work, shopping – is seen to violate privacy expectations, even without directly collecting GPS data, that is, standard markers representing location in technical systems. Although our findings, by themselves, do not support specific lines of legal regulation they leave little doubt of a damaging rift between how these beneficiaries of location surveillance communicate their practices and how we, its subjects, understand it. Only when this rift is repaired will it be possible adequately to regulate location surveillance – through policy, law, and technology – to meet privacy expectations and promote privacy’s societal value.

Currently, we frame individuals online as in a series of exchanges with specific firms, and privacy, accordingly, is governed to ensure trust within those relationships. However, the focus on the relationship between consumers and specific firms does not capture how the online environment behaves. The aggregation and secondary use of consumer data is performed by market actors behind the scenes without any relationship with consumers. Trusting a single firm is not enough; individuals must trust the online market in general. Such institutional trust has gone under-examined in regards to privacy online. Little has been done to measure how aggregating and using consumer data supports a larger online market and impacts institutional trust online. This paper explores how privacy governance should also be framed as protecting a larger market to ensure consumers trust being online. In a series of studies, I empirically examine (a) how typical secondary uses are judged along a generalized (for the good of the market) versus reciprocal (for the good of the consumer) exchange and impact institutional and consumer trust, and (b) whether governance mechanisms (limitations on the use of data such as adequate notice, auditing, non-identifiable information, limited storage, etc.) increase consumer trust in companies. I find: • Respondents find secondary uses of consumer data more appropriate if judged more within a generalized exchange (academic research) or within a reciprocal exchange (product search results) or both (credit security). However, most secondary uses of data are deemed privacy violations and decrease institutional trust online. • Using privacy notices is the least effective governance mechanism of those included here whereas being subject to an audit was as effective as using anonymized data in improving consumer trust. • Institutional trust online impacts a consumer’s willingness to engage with a specific online partner in a trust game experiment The findings have implications for public policy and practice. Secondary uses of information online need not only be justified in a simple quid-pro-quo exchange with the consumer but could also be justified as appropriate for the online context within a generalized exchange. However, the majority of secondary uses currently popular cannot be justified as within either a general exchange or a reciprocal exchange and are judged inappropriate, violations of privacy, and decrease both interpersonal and institutional trust. Second, if privacy violations hurt not only interpersonal consumer trust in a firm but also institutional trust online, then privacy would be governed similar to insider trading, fraud, or bribery — to protect the integrity of the market. Punishment for privacy violations would be set to ensure bad behavior is curtailed and institutional trust is maintained rather than to remediate a specific harm to an individual.

As individuals navigate their lives on websites and apps, their movements, searches, and actions are silently tracked. Streams of consumer data are then pooled by data aggregators and mined to identify potential vulnerabilities of consumers. These potential weaknesses, e.g. whether someone is in financial distress, having a health crisis, or battling an addiction, are valuable to marketers and ad networks in order to silently steer consumers’ market actions towards the manipulator’s interests. While identified early on as problematic within the economics of information broadly, the use of hyper-targeting to manipulate consumers is underappreciated as a threat to not only the autonomy of individuals but also the efficiency and legitimacy of markets. The phenomenon of interest in this article is targeted manipulation as the covert leveraging of a specific target’s vulnerabilities to steer their decisions to the manipulator’s interests. I position online targeted manipulation as undermining the core economic assumptions of authentic choice in the market. I then explore how important choice is to markets and economics, how firms gained positions of power to exploit vulnerabilities and weaknesses of individuals without the requisite safeguards in place, and how to govern firms in the position to manipulate. The power to manipulate is the power to undermine choice in the market. As such, firms in the position to manipulate threaten the autonomy of individuals, diminish the efficiency of transactions, and undermine the legitimacy of markets. The goal of this paper is to argue that firms merely in the position to manipulate, with knowledge of individual’s weaknesses and access to their decision making, should be regulated to ensure their interests are aligned with the target. The economic oddity is not that firms have data that render another market actor vulnerable, rather the oddity is that so many firms have data to covertly manipulate others without safeguards in place. Market actors regularly share information about their concerns, preferences, weaknesses, and strengths within contracts or joint ventures or within a relationship with professional duties. Online, companies have collected preferences and concerns without such safeguards in place. The point of manipulation is to covertly steer a target’s decision towards the manipulator’s interests and away from the target’s; as such, manipulation impedes a market actor’s ability to enact preferences through choice. This undermining of choice – rather than harms to the consumer – is the basis for additional safeguards on those in the position to manipulate. Governing targeted manipulation online will require additional safeguards on those firms in the position manipulate rather than attempting to identify each instance of targeted manipulation. First, additional safeguards are needed limiting data aggregators and ad networks – specifically any data trafficker without any relationship with consumers – to ensure the use of information is in the interests of the consumer. These obligations of care do not rely on any harm to be quantified or for a consumer to negotiate or enforce the obligation. Instead, internal and external governance structures will be required to ensure the duty of care is enforced including external auditing to ensure the data trafficker abides by standards of care and data integrity. Second, customer facing websites and apps act as gatekeepers by luring consumers in to have their data tracked by third parties and later to be targeted with manipulative content. In so doing, consumer facing companies should be responsible to ensure all third parties that access their users – either for the collection of data or for the targeting of content – abide by a standards of care that are audited. Companies are regularly held responsible for how third parties treat their customers, users, or employees; and, websites and apps should be held responsible for the third party ad networks, trackers, and data traffickers they invite to surveille and manipulate their users. Where scholarship has focused on identifying instances of manipulation to regulate, I argue that firms merely in the position to manipulate, with knowledge of the individual and access to their decision making, should be regulated to ensure their interests are aligned with the target.

The goal of this article is to examine the strategic choices of firms collecting consumer data online and to identify the roles and obligations of the actors within the current network of online tracking. In doing so, the focus shifts from placing the onus on individuals to make an informed choice, to justifying the roles and responsibilities of firms when gathering, aggregating, and using consumers' interests or behavior online. Firms online are uniquely positioned to undercut or to respect privacy expectations within three possible roles: as a member of a supply chain of information traders, within a network of surveillance online, and as an arm of law enforcement. These firms benefit from aggregating and analyzing consumer data and have an associated responsibility to not only minimize the harm to consumers but also to enact change where the firm is in the most knowledgeable and powerful position.

Recent privacy scholarship has focused on the failure of adequate notice and consumer choice as a tool to address consumers’ privacy expectations online. However, a direct examination of how complying with privacy notice is related to meeting privacy expectations online has not been performed. This paper reports the findings of an empirical examination of how judgments about privacy notices are related to privacy expectations. A factorial vignette study describing online consumer tracking asked respondents to rate the degree online scenarios met consumers’ privacy expectations or complied with a privacy notice. The results suggest respondents perceived the privacy notice as offering greater protections than the actual privacy notice. Perhaps most problematic, respondents projected the important factors of their privacy expectations onto the privacy notice. In other words, privacy notices became a tabula rasa for users’ privacy expectations. The findings provide guidance for policy makers and firms to avoid unnecessary privacy violations caused by an over reliance on privacy notices. Considering the importance of privacy notices in managing privacy online, more work should extend this study to understand how consumers understand notices and how consumers’ perceptions of privacy notices map to their privacy expectations – if at all.

Two dominant theoretical models for privacy-individual privacy preferences and context-dependent definitions of privacy-are often studied separately in information systems research. This paper unites these theories by examining how individual privacy preferences impact context-dependent privacy expectations. The paper theorizes that experience provides a bridge between individuals' general privacy attitudes and nuanced contextual factors. This leads to the hypothesis that, when making judgments about privacy expectations, individuals with less experience in a context rely more on individual preferences such as their generalized privacy beliefs, whereas individuals with more experience in a context are influenced by contextual factors and norms. To test this hypothesis, 1,925 American users of mobile applications made judgments about whether varied real-world scenarios involving data collection and use met their privacy expectations. Analysis of the data suggests that experience using mobile applications did moderate the effect of individual preferences and contextual factors on privacy judgments. Experience changed the equation respondents used to assess whether data collection and use scenarios met their privacy expectations. Discovering the bridge between 2 dominant theoretical models enables future privacy research to consider both personal and contextual variables by taking differences in experience into account.

Within a given conversation or information exchange, do privacy expectations change based on the technology used? Firms regularly require users, customers, and employees to shift existing relationships onto new information technology, yet little is known as about how technology impacts established privacy expectations and norms. Coworkers are asked to use new information technology, users of gmail are asked to use GoogleBuzz, patients and doctors are asked to record health records online, etc. Understanding how privacy expectations change, if at all, and the mechanisms by which such a variance is produced will help organizations make such transitions. This paper examines whether and how privacy expectations change based on the technological platform of an information exchange. The results suggest that privacy expectations are significantly distinct when the information exchange is located on a novel technology as compared to a more established technology. Furthermore, this difference is best explained when modeled by a shift in privacy expectations rather than fully technology-specific privacy norms. These results suggest that privacy expectations online are connected to privacy offline with a different base privacy expectation. Surprisingly, out of the five locations tested, respondents consistently assign information on email the greatest privacy protection. In addition, while undergraduate students differ from non-undergraduates when assessing a social networking site, no difference is found when judging an exchange on email. In sum, the findings suggest that novel technology may introduce temporary conceptual muddles rather than permanent privacy vacuums. The results reported here challenge conventional views about how privacy expectations differ online versus offline. Traditionally, management scholarship examines privacy online or with a specific new technology platform in isolation and without reference to the same information exchange offline. However, in the present study, individuals appear to have a shift in their privacy expectations but retain similar factors and their relative importance--the privacy equation by which they form judgments--across technologies. These findings suggest that privacy scholarship should make use of existing privacy norms within contexts when analyzing and studying privacy in a new technological platform.

Within Science and Technology Studies, much work has been accomplished to identify the moral importance of technology in order to clarify the influence of scientists, technologists, and managers. However, similar studies within business ethics have not kept pace with the nuanced and contextualized study of technology within Science and Technology Studies. In this article, I analyze current arguments within business ethics as limiting both the moral importance of technology and the influence of managers. As I argue, such assumptions serve to narrow the scope of business ethics in the examination of technology. To reinforce the practical implications of these assumptions and to further illustrated the current arguments, I leverage the recent dialog around U.S. Internet technologies in China. The goal of this article is to broaden that which is morally salient and relevant to business managers and business ethicists in the analysis of technology by highlighting key lessons from seminal STS scholars. This article should be viewed as part of a nascent yet burgeoning dialog between business ethics and Science and Technology Studies – a dialog that benefits both fields of study.

The construct of an information dichotomy has played a defining role in regulating privacy: information deemed private or sensitive typically earns high levels of protection, while lower levels of protection are accorded to information deemed public or non-sensitive. Challenging this dichotomy, the theory of contextual integrity associates privacy with complex typologies of information, each connected with respective social contexts. Moreover, it contends that information type is merely one among several variables that shape people’s privacy expectations and underpin privacy’s normative foundations. Other contextual variables include key actors - information subjects, senders, and recipients - as well as the principles under which information is transmitted, such as whether with subjects’ consent, as bought and sold, as required by law, and so forth. Prior work revealed the systematic impact of these other variables on privacy assessments, thereby debunking the defining effects of so-called private information. In this paper, we shine a light on the opposite effect, challenging conventional assumptions about public information. The paper reports on a series of studies, which probe attitudes and expectations regarding information that has been deemed public. Public records established through the historical practice of federal, state, and local agencies, as a case in point, are afforded little privacy protection, or possibly none at all. Motivated by progressive digitization and creation of online portals through which these records have been made publicly accessible our work underscores the need for more concentrated and nuanced privacy assessments, even more urgent in the face of vigorous open data initiatives, which call on federal, state, and local agencies to provide access to government records in both human and machine readable forms. Within a stream of research suggesting possible guard rails for open data initiatives, our work, guided by the theory of contextual integrity, provides insight into the factors systematically shaping individuals’ expectations and normative judgments concerning appropriate uses of and terms of access to information. Using a factorial vignette survey, we asked respondents to rate the appropriateness of a series of scenarios in which contextual elements were systematically varied; these elements included the data recipient (e.g. bank, employer, friend,.), the data subject, and the source, or sender, of the information (e.g. individual, government, data broker). Because the object of this study was to highlight the complexity of people’s privacy expectations regarding so-called public information, information types were drawn from data fields frequently held in public government records (e.g. voter registration, marital status, criminal standing, and real property ownership). Our findings are noteworthy on both theoretical and practical grounds. In the first place, they reinforce key assertions of contextual integrity about the simultaneous relevance to privacy of other factors beyond information types. In the second place, they reveal discordance between truisms that have frequently shaped public policy relevant to privacy. For example, • Ease of accessibility does not drive judgments of appropriateness. Thus, even when respondents deemed information easy to access (marital status) they nevertheless judged it inappropriate (“Not OK”) to access this information under certain circumstances.• Even when it is possible to find certain information in public records, respondents cared about the immediate source of that information in judging whether given data flows were appropriate. In particular, no matter that information in question was known to be available in public records, respondents deemed inappropriate all circumstances in which data brokers were the immediate source of information. • Younger respondents (under 35 years old) were more critical of using data brokers and online government records as compared with the null condition of asking data subjects directly, debunking conventional wisdom that “digital natives” are uninterested in privacy. One immediate application to public policy is in the sphere of access to records that include information about identifiable or reachable individuals. This study has shown that individuals have quite strong normative expectations concerning appropriate access and use of information in public records that do not comport with the maxim, “anything goes.” Furthermore, these expectations are far from idiosyncratic and arbitrary. Our work calls for approaches to providing access that are more judicious than a simple on/off spigot. Complex information ontologies, credentials of key actors (i.e. sender and recipients in relation to data subject), and terms of access – even lightweight ones – such as, identity or role authentication, varying privilege levels, or a commitment to limited purposes may all be used to adjust public access to align better with legitimate privacy expectations. Such expectations should be systematically considered when crafting policies around public records and open data initiatives.

Employee monitoring has raised concerns from all areas of society – business organizations, employee interest groups, privacy advocates, civil libertarians, lawyers, professional ethicists, and every combination possible. Each advocate has its own rationale for or against employee monitoring whether it be economic, legal, or ethical. However, no matter what the form of reasoning, seven key arguments emerge from the pool of analysis. These arguments have been used equally from all sides of the debate. The purpose of this paper is to examine the seven key arguments that have been made with respect to employee monitoring. None of these arguments is conclusive and each calls for managerial and moral consideration. We conclude that a more comprehensive inquiry with ethical concern at the center is necessary to make further progress on understanding the complexity of employee monitoring. The final section of this paper sketches out how such an inquiry would proceed.

The words “innovative” and “innovation” are bantered about in the media, in business, and in our everyday lives. The words evoke a feeling of progress with technology moving us upward and forward while simultaneously pushing aside existing, soon to be outdated, technology. How does business “handle” this disruption? How can we think about the responsibility for the innovation and the associated wake of changed beliefs, behaviors, and relationships? Business has a special role within the technological life cycle. Firms are the mechanism through which technology is introduced to the market and are made useful. Keywords: technology; ethics; innovative; innovation; social determinism; technological determinists; internet and information technology; nanotechnology; biotechnology

It is commonplace for those who support less restrictive privacy regulation on the collection and use of personal information to point out a paradox: in survey after survey, respondents express deep concern for privacy, oppose growing surveillance and data practices, and object to online tracking and behavioral advertising. Yet when confronted with actual choices involving the capture or exchange of information few people demonstrate restraint: we sign up for frequent flyer and frequent buyer programs, we are carefree in our use of social networks and mobile apps, and we blithely hop from one website to the next, filling out forms, providing feedback, and contributing ratings. Privacy skeptics suggest that actions should be considered a truer indicator than words. Even if people are honest in their positive valuation of privacy in surveys, in action and behavior they reveal even greater valuation of those benefits that might come at a privacy cost. In other words, people care about privacy, but not that much.The inconsistencies between survey responses and observed behaviors that skeptics gleefully observe require a nuanced interpretation – one that we have offered through our studies. We argue the disconnect between actions and survey findings is, not because people do not care about privacy but because individuals’ actions are finely modulated to contextual variables. Questions in surveys that do not fix such important contextual variables explicitly are highly ambiguous.A more nuanced view of privacy is able to explain away a great deal of what skeptics claim is a divergence of behavior from stated preference and opinion. People care about and value privacy – privacy defined as respecting the appropriate norms of information flow for a given context. When respondents are given a chance to offer more fine-grained judgments about specific information-sharing situations, these judgments are quite nuanced. This is problematic since public policy relies on survey measurements of privacy concerns – such as Westin’s measurement of individuals as privacy ‘pragmatists’ or ‘unconcerned’ – to drive privacy regulations. Specifically, Westin’s categories give credence to the regulation of privacy based by FIPPs, which relies heavily on assuring individuals notice and choice. We examine two historically influential measurements of privacy that have shaped discussion about public views and sentiments as well as practices, regulations, and policies: (1) surveys of individuals’ ratings of ‘sensitive’ information and (2) Alan Westin’s privacy categorization of individuals as fundamentalists, pragmatists, and unconcerned. In addition to replicating key components in these two survey streams, we used a factorial vignette survey to identify important contextual elements driving privacy expectations. A sample of 569 respondents rated how a series of vignettes, in which contextual elements of data recipient and data use had been systematically varied, met their privacy expectations. We find, first, that how well sensitive information meets privacy expectations is highly dependent on these contextual elements. Second, Westin’s privacy categories proved relatively unimportant in relation to contextual elements in privacy judgments. Even privacy ‘unconcerned’ respondents rated the vignettes as not meeting privacy expectations on average, and respondents across categories had a common vision of what constitutes a privacy violation. This study has important implications for pubic policy and research. For public policy, these results suggest that relying on one dimension – sensitive information, privacy categorization of respondent – is limiting. In particular, focusing on differences in privacy expectations across consumers obscures the common vision of what is appropriate use of information for consumers. This paper has significant public policy implications for the reliance on consumer choice as a necessary approach to accommodate consumer variance: our results suggest consumers agree as to the inappropriate use of information. Our study has called privacy concepts into question by showing ‘sensitivity’ of information and ‘concern’ about privacy are not stable in the face of confounding variables: privacy categories and sensitive labels prove to be highly influenced by the context and use of the situation. Our work demonstrates the importance of teasing out confounding variables in these historically influential studies.

The goal of this paper is to outline the laudable goals and ultimate failure of notice and choice to respect privacy online and suggest an alternative framework to manage and research privacy. This paper suggests that the online environment is not conducive to rely on explicit agreements to respect privacy. Current privacy concerns online are framed as a temporary market failure resolvable through two options: (a) ameliorating frictions within the current notice and choice governance structure or (b) shifting from a contract-governed exchange to a focus on implicit, negotiated rules within a long-term relationship. Importantly for firms, examining privacy in practice shifts the firm’s responsibility from adequate notice to identifying and managing the cost-benefit analysis within a specific context.

Declining levels of stakeholder trust in business are of concern to business executives and scholars for legitimacy- and performance-related effects. Research in the area of stakeholder trust in business is nascent; therefore, the trust formation process has been rarely examined at the stakeholder level. Furthermore, the role of personal values as one significant influence in trust formation has been under-researched. In this paper, we develop a contingency model for stakeholder trust formation based on the effects of stakeholder-specific vulnerability and personal values of the trustor. Using a factorial vignette methodology, we find that Schwartz’s (J Soc Issues 50:19–45, 1994) value set interacts with stakeholder roles so that trustworthiness signals of competence and character play differing roles during trust formation. These results inform stakeholder trust research, organizational trust research, and research in personal values. The research also informs managers tasked with rebuilding stakeholder trust in business.

An increasing amount of social activity and commerce is performed using applications running on mobile devices such as phones and tablets. During these activities, mobile applications collect increasing amounts of personal data. Consumers, organizations, and regulators struggle to address privacy expectations for these new forms of data collection across a diverse set of activities. This paper describes findings from empirical research employing a context-based survey to understand consumers’ privacy expectations for mobile devices across diverse real-world contexts (e.g., consulting medical applications, navigating using map applications, or playing music or games, etc). The project tests the hypotheses that (a) individuals hold different privacy expectations based on the social context of their mobile activity, and (b) contextual factors such as who (the data collection actor, e.g. the application developer or mobile phone provider), what (data attributes, e.g. the type of information received or tracked by the primary organization), why (application purpose, e.g. playing games, checking the weather, participating in social networking, navigating using maps, listening to music, banking, shopping, and organizing personal productivity) and how (the use of data by the collector, e.g. the amount of time data is stored or how that data is reused) affect individuals’ privacy expectations. This paper reports on survey findings that identify contextual factors of importance in the mobile data ecosystem. Our survey demonstrated that overall, very common activities of mobile application companies such as harvesting and reusing location data, accelerometer readings, demographic data, contacts, keywords, name, images and friends do not meet users’ privacy expectations. But these differences are modulated by both information type and social context. Addressing privacy expectations for mobile devices is an explicit goal of US regulatory bodies and firms rely on understanding privacy expectations to gain the trust of users. Understanding how consumer privacy expectations change in different data use and business contexts can help regulators identify contexts that may require stricter privacy protections and help firms and managers better meet privacy expectations of users. Study results help us understand one aspect of mobile privacy: the expectations of consumers as they vary by context. These expectations have direct implications for researchers, business leaders, policy experts, and consumers.

Public trust in business, or the degree to which external stakeholders such as the public trust business in general is largely understudied. As the relevance of public trust in business becomes ever more obvious to practitioners and scholars, the levels of trust in business have reached alarmingly low levels. On the one hand, political, economic, societal and technical developments lead to more need for public trust in business, on the other hand organizations, especially corporations, are arguably further eroding public trust. Hence, a trust gap is emerging which is likely to impair successful business development. Therefore business executives and scholars have become interested in how organizations can reestablish and maintain public trust to remain legitimate and secure long-term survival. Before scholars and practitioners can answer this important question, we must better understand the concept of public trust. This paper suggests four domains of existing trust research that scholars of public trust in business can draw from. Then we propose several hypotheses which aim to predict the determinants of public trust and test these hypotheses using a factorial vignette methodology. These results provide scholars with more direction as this is, to our knowledge, the first empirical study of public trust. Furthermore the study will enable those companies interested in increasing public trust to better understand respective determinants of public trust.

Philosopher Richard Rudner (1953) eloquently argued that scientists, in their role as scientists and performing the tasks core to being a scientist, make value judgments. Scientists make decisions in assigning value, importance, and priority to overall endeavors, particular projects, and specific hypotheses which have moral implications. In other words, if we identify a minimal core of the scientific method which transcends context, which Rudner does, we find value judgments made by scientists. Scientists are not value-neutral or amoral in their endeavors. Rather, as he aptly titled his article, scientists, qua scientists, make value judgments (Rudner, 1953). In this paper, I argue that the entrepreneur qua entrepreneur - as the creator of future markets for goods and services (Venkataraman, 1997) - makes value judgments. Entrepreneurship and ethics scholarship recognizes that the entrepreneur as an organization theorist, small business owner, business partner, financier, accountant, and strategic partner makes value judgments. Yet, the core of the entrepreneurial process - the tasks that transcend particular industries, locations, or forms - is the creation of markets for goods and services (Venkataraman, 1997), and the recognition, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities begets value-laden technologies that have been neglected in entrepreneurship scholarship. These technologies are designed and implemented by the entrepreneur and later impact stakeholders of technology. For example, a bottle is designed to be completely biodegradable, a social networking site is developed to leverage relationships for advertising, or airport surveillance is designed to monitor citizens. Capturing the implications of goods and services on society is difficult and complicated; hence, the entire field of Science and Technology Studies has developed for that purpose (Johnson, 2006). Rather than view goods and services as value-neutral (e.g., “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”), technology is designed to facilitate certain behavior and beliefs. These goods and services, or these technologies, are studied closely within engineering schools as the technologies entrepreneurs take to market impact a variety of stakeholders. Rather than place the onus to analyze and modify the implications of goods and services on the adopting market, the entrepreneur can be viewed as uniquely positioned to oversee technology during a critical, formative stage of technological development. Within the ongoing analysis of entrepreneurship, we have yet to include a careful ethical examination of entrepreneurial goods and services. I leverage theoretical constructs within Science and Technology Studies to examine the moral implications of entrepreneurial goods and services. Through this expanded view of technology, we see the goods and services differently - less abstract and with more morally important features, biases, and values. Identifying the post-exploitation effects of goods and services on society has implications to the process of entrepreneurial activity. In turn, I revisit the role of entrepreneurs during the entrepreneurial process and suggest the implications to entrepreneurship and ethics scholarship when applying this new view of goods and services.As noted by Rudner, “To refuse to pay attention to the value decisions which must be made, to make them intuitively, unconsciously, haphazardly, is to leave an essential aspect of scientific method scientifically out of control.” (1953: 6). Similarly, by not explicitly acknowledging the values and biases of entrepreneurial goods and services, we are left with few tools to understand the moral implications of entrepreneurial decision making during the entrepreneurial process. This paper seeks to explicitly identify such value decisions of entrepreneurs by exploring whether, when, and how entrepreneurs qua entrepreneurs make value judgments in converting technical information into goods and services.

Employee monitoring has raised concerns from all areas of society - business organizations, employee interest groups, privacy advocates, civil libertarians, lawyers, professional ethicists, and every combination possible. Each advocate has its own rationale for or against employee monitoring whether it be economic, legal, or ethical. However, no matter what the form of reasoning, seven key arguments emerge from the pool of analysis. These arguments have been used equally from all sides of the debate. The purpose of this paper is to examine seven key arguments that have been made with respect to employee monitoring. None of these arguments are conclusive and each raises important managerial and moral consideration. We conclude that a more comprehensive inquiry with ethical concern at the center is necessary to make further progress on understanding the complexity of employee monitoring. The final section of this paper sketches out how such an inquiry would proceed.

The goal of this paper is to empirically examine factors driving consumers’ judgments about meeting privacy expectations online. This study allows for privacy expectations to be dependent on the context of the information exchange, identifies the contextually dependent factors driving privacy judgments, and examines whether and how individual’s characteristics impact privacy judgments. Individual-specific information – including institutional trust in websites and a general importance placed on privacy online – does not adequately predict privacy expectations within particular online situations. Predictions based on individual factors significantly overestimate the degree to which scenarios would meet privacy expectations particularly for respondents with a self-reported low priority for privacy. Contextual factors, such as the secondary use of information or the tracking of friends, significantly impact the degree privacy expectations are met. The results suggest that firms should evaluate specific priva...

Privacy issues surrounding the use of social media sites have been apparent over the past ten years. Use of such sites, particularly Facebook, has been increasing and recently business organizations have begun using Facebook as a means of connecting with potential customers or clients. Using a factorial design previously introduced by Martin (2010), this paper presents an empirical study of perceived privacy violations and their seriousness to examine factors that might influence the expectations of privacy on Facebook. Results of the study suggest that the more important Facebook is to users the more likely they are to perceive privacy violations and the more likely those violations are serious. Furthermore, how information is used is more important than the way this information is accessed.

Recent scholarship in philosophy, law, and information systems suggests that respecting privacy entails understanding the implicit privacy norms about what, why, and to whom information is shared within specific relationships. These social contracts are important to understand if firms are to adequately manage the privacy expectations of stakeholders. This paper explores a social contract approach to developing, acknowledging, and protecting privacy norms within specific contexts. While privacy as a social contract—a mutually beneficial agreement within a community about sharing and using information—has been introduced theoretically and empirically, the full impact on firms of an alternative framework to respecting the privacy expectations of stakeholders has not been examined. The goal of this paper is to examine how privacy norms develop through social contract’s narrative, to redescribe privacy violations given the social contract approach, and to critically examine the role of business as a contractor in developing privacy norms. A social contract narrative dealing specifically with issues of privacy is an important next step in exploring a social contract approach to privacy. Here, the narrative is used to explain to analyze the dynamic process of privacy norm generation within particular communities. Based on this narrative, individuals within a given community discriminately share information with a particular set of obligations in mind as to who has access to the information and how it will be used. Rather than giving away privacy, individuals discriminately share information within a particular community and with norms governing the use of their information. Similar to contractual business ethics’ impact on global commerce in explaining how and why norms vary across global contexts, the social contract approach to privacy explains how and why norms vary across communities of actors. Focusing on agreements around privacy expectations shifts the responsibility of firms from adequate notification to the responsibility of firms as contractors to maintain a mutually beneficial and sustainable solution.