Project Business Ethics

1. Unethical Web Sites and Companies:

In general, most online business is ethical. Do businesses with online businesses with a good reputation like amazon.com? However, there are lots of unethical businesses out there. My mother got ripped off by grab.com. When she went back to try to get her money back, she couldn't find an E-mail address of anyone to contact. Never, ever give your credit card information to any online business that does not have easy-to-find contact information. She did finally find a phone number. The phone was answered by someone who’s English made the phone call difficult. When she called back later, she got an answering machine.

Beware postal or E-mail from Interland, which advertises itself as a "Network Solutions Alliance Partner." They are sending out things that look like bills for domain registration. But what if you never registered your site through Interland in the first place? How ethical is sending out an advertisement disguised as a bill? You are under no obligation to use them. This is similar to the practice of slamming practiced by some phone companies - your service is changed almost without your consent. Be sure to read all mail about domain registration very carefully, and register with the company you choose, not some outfit that's gotten your domain information out of the who is database.

There's a site called RemarQ (formerly Super news), that copies and alters USENET postings and treats them as if they were special newsgroups at their site. This is a particularly appalling, scummy practice. They put links in your posts without your permission!

2.  Kill Trapping Frame:

I've noticed a real increase lately in people using frames to "capture" the browser - instead of opening a new window, or refreshing the whole browser window when a new site is displayed, the new site is inserted in one of the frame windows. I don't want nested frames within frames - when I select a link, I want to see the new site and not see a frame from the old around it.

I think this practice unethical - kind of like ABC grabbing part of the TV screen after the user switched to CBS.

Using frames like this makes it difficult to create a bookmark to the page that's trapped in the frame. Yes, you can do it but it isn't as easy as just saving a bookmark. And unsophisticated viewers might think these pages are part of the site doing to trapping, when they're someone else's work.

Most sites, especially CNN, handle links out of their site in a much more ethical manner. I will not link to sites that grab part of the screen after you've left their site. John Dvorak wrote of this practice, calling it "the prison effect" in a zdnet article a few years back.

Almost all of my pages now include code that automatically breaks pages out of trapping frames. So if another site tries to "imprison" one of my Web pages, this code puts my Web page in the browser without the old frame around it.