Irene Pollach

What's wrong with online privacy policies?

Research has shown that privacy policies tend to intensify privacy concerns rather than engender trust. One way to combat this dichotomy is to redesign their content, language, and presentation format.

Corporate self‐presentation on the WWW

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify starting points for improving corporate self‐presentation on the world wide web (WWW) by enhancing site usability, message credibility, and information utility.Design/methodology/approach – Content analysis, quantitative linguistic analysis and discourse analysis were used to examine the “About Us” sections of 20 well‐known corporate web sites.Findings – The findings suggest that companies recognise the challenges provided by WWW‐mediated communication but fail to respond adequately. The companies could enhance their web sites by adopting a more user‐centred approach, constructing more convincing arguments and raising the level of interactivity in order to present their audiences with more relevant information.Research limitations/implications – The findings of this study are limited by the fast‐paced nature of the internet. The content and structure of the pages may have changed substantially since the research was conducted.Practical implications – Comp...

Communicating Corporate Ethics on the World Wide Web: A Discourse Analysis of Selected Company Web Sites

This dissertation explores how companies communicate their ethical stance on their Web sites. The author analyzed the Web sites of six companies: BellSouth, Lockheed Martin, Ben & Jerrys, McDonalds, Nike, and Levi Strauss. This sample offers both typicality and systematic variety as the six companies belong to three different ethics paradigms. The linguistic analysis of the Web pages draws on a functional approach to discourse analysis, focusing on the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual function of discourse. Despite the fact that the companies selected for the dissertation project have adopted different approaches to corporate ethics, their communicative strategies turned out to be quite similar regarding content, persuasive appeals, self-reference, audience address, and message organization.

Electronic Word of Mouth: A Genre Analysis of Product Reviews on Consumer Opinion Web Sites

Consumer opinion Web sites enable consumers to post reviews of products and services or view the experiences of other consumers. This form of writing can be considered a truly digital genre, as consumers were not able to share their opinions with other consumers in a structured, written format before the advent of the Internet. To identify rules and conventions established by the genre community, a sample of 358 product reviews was examined using a methodology that combines elements of case study research, corpus linguistics, and textual analysis. More precisely, the analysis focused on structure, content, audience appeals, sentence style, and word choice. The results of this analysis have implications for improving the design of consumer opinion Web sites with a view to making them more useful sources of consumer knowledge.

Privacy Statements as a Means of Uncertainty Reduction in WWW Interactions

Grounded in Uncertainty Reduction Theory, the present study analyzes the content of 50 privacy policies from well-known commercial Web sites with a view to identifying starting points for improving the quality of online privacy policies. Drawing on traditional content analysis and computer-assisted textual analysis, the study shows that privacy policies often omit essential information and fail to communicate data handling practices in a transparent manner. To reduce Internet users’ uncertainty about data handling practices and to help companies build stable relationships with users, privacy policies need to explain not only the data collection and sharing practices a company engages in but also those practices in which companies do not engage. Further, more exact lexical choice in privacy policies would increase the transparency of data handling practices and, therefore, user trust in World Wide Web (WWW) interactions. The results also call for less verbose texts and alternatives to the current narrative presentation format.

Evaluating personalization and customization from an ethical point of view: an empirical study

This paper examines whether classic ethical theories can solve the ethical dilemmas associated with user-controlled customization and system-driven personalization of Web sites. Based on the notion that data sensitivity is not a universal concept but comes in different levels of intensity, we conducted an Internet-based survey among consumers to determine their level of data sensitivity and their attitudes towards personalization and customization. Our results have shown that users can be classified into different groups who differ significantly in terms of data sensitivity. Applying ethical theories to personalization and customization has led to conflicting conclusions, but they are in line with the findings from the survey, suggesting that customization is ethically less questionable than personalization.

Determining the Semantic Orientation of Web-Based Corpora

The Web media monitoring methodology underlying this paper provides linguistic descriptives by automatically mirroring, processing and comparing large samples of Web-based corpora. Since May 1999, the database of the webLyzard project has continually been extended and now comprises more than 3,700 sites, which are being monitored in monthly intervals. The wealth of information contained in these sites is converted into aggregated representations through structural and textual analysis. Based on word frequencies and distance measures, perceptual maps and the semantic orientation of Web-based corpora towards particular concepts are computed.

Online Fundraising for Environmental Nonprofit Organizations

Although the Internet provides nonprofit organizations with unprecedented opportunities for fundraising, the volume of online donations has been miniscule. Since one reason for this may be peoples distrust in financial transactions on the World Wide Web, we conducted a survey to gain insights into user trust in and attitudes toward online payment systems. The results indicate that peoples trust in both the organization and the Internet are key factors in shaping their attitudes toward online payments, which in turn influences peoples likelihood of using the Internet for financial transactions such as online donations. Our findings suggest that nonprofits need to pay particular attention to donor relationships, process transparency, and transaction security in order to induce people to donate online.

Environmental websites: an empirical investigation of functionality and accessibility

Although the critical role of the internet for disseminating environmental information to achieve sustainability is widely recognised, academic research has not paid much attention to the functionality and accessibility of environmental websites maintained by organisations in the public or the voluntary sector. To fill this gap, the present study seeks to suggest ways in which environmental websites could make more effective use of the internets capabilities for disseminating information. This paper investigates 226 environmental websites, taking into account features, such as orientation devices, interaction, information exchange, timeliness, accessibility and the possibility of donating online. Different types of websites (air, forest, water, directories) are compared and examined for significant differences. The results strongly suggest that environmental websites have not yet fully tapped the internets potential, since only few environmental websites meet the overall technical, functional and design...

Environmental Web Sites: An Empirical Investigation of Functionality and Accessibility

Although the critical role of the Internet for disseminating environmental information to achieve sustainability is widely recognized, academic research has not paid much attention to the functionality and accessibility of environmental Web sites maintained by organizations in the public or the voluntary sector. To fill this gap, the present study seeks to suggest ways in which environmental Web sites could make more effective use of the Internets capabilities for disseminating information. This paper investigates 226 environmental Web sites, taking into account features such as orientation devices, interaction, information exchange, timeliness, accessibility and the possibility of donating online. Different types of Web sites (air, forest, water, directories) are compared and examined for signiJicant differences. The results strongly suggest that environmental Web sites have not yet fully tapped the Internets potential, since only few environmental Web sites meet the overall technical, functional and design-related stanhrds their commercial counterparts have adopted.