Ethical Standards in E-Commerce

I did check the MDL search tool to see if there was already some sort of thread on this topic and out of seven pages of results using the word "ethical" I didn't find any sort of thread on this topic, except for one about some kind of hacking that Yen .rightly pointed out was very weird:

https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/ethical-hacking.28819/#post-479006

But if I messed up and there is one on ethical standards in e-commerce, please excuse my error.

So this is one heck of a topic to get into and I sure hope it stays sort of civilized, but that is one of many tasks of the mods and admins around here, right? Keep us on the straight and narrow.

We frequently read about companies of all sizes in e-commerce that seem to engage in borderline 'not good' tactics, and I have recently run smack into some really weird stuff and decided maybe a bit of a discussion might help me figure out a few things. The problem I sense that is going to come up is folks may get the idea I am just venting anger and that isn't really the case. I am sincerely wondering just who is the best at watching out for ethics in Net business? A search with Google's search tool obviously brought up a whole bunch of stuff, and down the road a bit some of those notes may end up here. But right now I am curious how many in this community really do pay any attention to the ethical standards of any given company doing business on the Net? Would anyone like to offer any specific examples of good or bad?

So I hit a few .edu sites and .gov sites during my first check, but for now let me see if anyone here is even interested in the topic. Could very well be that nobody cares, so I'll pause at this point and see what happens.

 

So I am asking myself about the laws that may, or may not, enforce standards of ethics. Surprisingly, I have not found much with an .edu tag that specifically deals with e-commerce or maybe better to call it business conducted on the Net.

But this article, in a pdf format is pulled from the journal, was interesting and I'll place this information here with the first sentence of the abstract:

The Paragraph 20 Paradox: An Evaluation of the Enforcement of Ethical Rules As Substantive Law

87 pages starting at page 252 of that journal.

 

I'm very curious what your reaction would be if you were told I own the bank?

 

As I wrote in the Opening Post, I am sincerely interested in the opinions some of the community members here may have about the idea that holding those that do business using the Internet should be held to a certain standard in matters that may fall under that which we would refer to as proper ethics.

Of course, that might also need to ask that somebody define "proper ethics" but maybe that can be found to have been written by some scholar, which I am not.

As for specific examples that I feel may reflect upon the question, my own are not yet time to be written about. All in good time. If there are no posts in this thread by any other community members, then my posting my own experiences would be a worthless exercise.

And thank you, case-sensitive, for asking.