February 1998 • Volume 8 • Number 2
Issues and the Internet — Update
By Kenneth S. Moser, CNA, CNSA
APICS Director of Information Services
Last September, I introduced you to a few of the major
controversies boiling around Internet censorship, encryption
and privacy. At present, the censorship issue appears to be
awaiting the outcome of a court battle over the use of
viewing filters at a Virginia library, and the conflict over
encryption appears to have subsided into a sort of Cold War
among parties. These issues aren't likely to affect many
APICS members or other Internet users in a big way any time
soon, so we'll leave them aside for now. Many of you have
asked about privacy online, however, and new developments
have occurred in other areas. Let's start with privacy.
If you have spent much time using Internet search engines, you probably know that people can find you pretty easily. Your telephone number and address are probably available through one of the phone searching services and, if you have an e-mail address, that is likely to be online as well. The information may or may not be up to date, but it's generally a good starting point. If you saw my presentation at the last APICS conference, you know that printing a road map to anyone's front door also is dirt simple.
If you think any of this is just a bit creepy, it's nothing compared to the information that many marketing groups want to know about you. When you access a site, it can cross-reference the information stored in your browser with logs of any previous visits, with any forms you have completed there, and with any other information that can be gathered from online services, credit bureaus and government files. Unless you've been a hermit, a site's reach is limited only by its resources and policies. Therefore, if you value your privacy, provide information only to sites you really want to have it, and then only if they have policies and procedures in place to protect you. How does APICS do this?
First of all, APICS collects only specific kinds of information for specific purposes. Like most sites, we log every visit to every page. Our site also sends inquiries to your system to determine what kind of browser and operating system you are using so we know how to design our pages. This information is published only in summary form — total number of hits and sessions per page, percentage of people using Netscape Navigator, etc. — and is not even stored by individual customer.
Our catalog requires the use of cookies (see sidebar for an explanation of cookies). There is nothing mysterious or unusual about this — it's just the simplest way to save information for your shopping cart. Before we request any credit card information, however, we move you over to what is called a secure session. Secure sessions use encryption to make it very difficult (some would say impossible) for nasty people to eavesdrop on you.
Like many other sites, APICS provides various kinds of registration forms (e.g., an e-mail address registration screen and membership application form), but they are completely voluntary. We use this information mainly to update your records and to avoid sending you information that does not meet your needs. If you access these screens, however, you will see that each one allows you to specify that the information you provide to us be restricted from distribution to outside vendors. APICS takes this kind of request very seriously.
Finally, APICS tracks e-mail sent to staff and compiles a one-time master listing of all new addresses every month to remind customers they may receive updates on developments at APICS by subscribing to the WhatsNew mailing list. For those of you who may have missed my last few articles, anyone may join this list by sending a request to [email protected]