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44 Sharma and Gupta
tal issues decrease with the elimination of carbon dioxide from commuting cars.
Quality of life in general increases where parents are able to spend more time with
their children and can play a more dominant role in their community. Nevertheless,
the negative aspect of telecommuting should not be ignored. The chief problem
appears to be the fear of losing touch.
The stimulation of interacting with colleagues may be lost and the resultant
gradual, social isolation may affect opportunities for promotion and the selection of
career-advancing assignments. Improved conditions and working from home will
be limited to those wearing white collars. The working classes will probably remain
9-to-5ers in hands-on, site-specific jobs. Therefore telecommuting can increase the
gap between social classes. Telecommuting could be seen as a different social class
with a different set of rules. The fact that traditional workers could be seen as failures
in such a society further increases rifts between social classes.
As the country’s young people age, and gain employment, they will increasingly
use e-commerce to purchase many consumer goods. This will serve to limit
the need for new regional shopping malls and strip-commercial centers. There will
be increased pressure for warehousing and distribution centers to meet the new
demand created by e-commerce (Kemp, 2001).
Loss of Security
E-commerce offerings not only provide new opportunities for customers and
businesses but also open companies up to security vulnerabilities. Privacy and
security concerns in e-commerce are under intense pressure from consumers,
lawmakers and regulators to provide foolproof security safeguards and policies to
protect their systems and customer privacy (Miyazaki & Fernandez, 2000).
Security refers to the integrity of the data storage, processing and transmitting
systems and includes concerns about the reliability of hardware and software, the
protection against intrusion, or infiltration by unauthorized users. While buying
online, people naively believe that their communication is private and secure.
Unfortunately, in many cases, that is not true and messages are insecure and
vulnerable to hackers. Any message sent on the Internet typically travels through
many computers. At each computer, it may be intercepted, read and even changed.
Skilled hackers may tap into communication particularly if it is financial in nature and
can benefit them. In spite of a number of security technologies used to protect
communication, expert hackers can still access sensitive data.
A variety of security breaches commonly take place in today’s world and often
are not reported by organizations. In the 2001 Computer Crime and Security
Survey (Computer Security Institute/Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2001), 91
percent of respondents said they had experienced a security breach, but only 36
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