Privacy Security of online Shopping

Impact of security breaches in students' online purchases

Business Research Methods – RSMT-5001

Group 5 x 5

Ana Paula H. de Alexandria - N01089653

Hoang Vu – N01088762

Naripdeep Kaur Sidhu – N01119836

Rajwinder Kaur – N01122854

Yogitaba Chauhan – N01012798

December 7th 2015

Table of Contents

Executive summary        

Introduction        

Project Background        

Research Problems and Objectives        

Methodology        

Research Design        

Sample Design        

Time Line        

Results        

Limitations        

Conclusions        

Recommendations        

Appendix 1 – Questionnaire        

Appendix 2 – Tables        

References        

Executive summary

        This paper provides the description, analysis and evaluation of the research project to the Business Research Method course. The objectives of this research are investigate the impact of security breaches in Humber Lakeshore students' online purchases during the fall semester, and also to determine the risks of publicized security breaches.

        This report specifies the research’s methodology, identifies the limitations and analyses the data collected through a questionnaire. The questionnaire model, tables and calculations used on the analysis are in the appendix.

         The results demonstrate that the Humber Lakeshore students are aware about the breaches of security online businesses and have a big concern about it. They use the internet to search, but 43% of the respondents prefer to purchase in the physical store and 34% of the respondents search online and buy online. Another important finding is that a large number of people, 77% of the respondents, answered that they prefer to stop the use of a website if they find any data leak on that website but there are few people who are not affected by it at all.

         The recommendations consist of investing in strong secure system. The companies also have to show their customers how important is policies of virtual security for them. For small companies the could computing maturity is now at a point that they could benefit from this technology, meaning that they now have access to the latest security technology at a reasonable price. They are specialized and able to maintain finance data of the clients in an prepared environment with constantly investment in security.

Impact of security breaches in students' online purchases

Introduction

Project Background

The objective of any business is maximization of profits and the internet became an excellent channel of sales for many businesses. Using online business, the companies can expand their market, increase their sales, and reduce costs with expensive rental of physical stores and specialized labor. However, there are another costs such as distribution and data security. From the consumer’s perspective, there are many advantages such as easy search price comparison, delivery, saving time, and the virtual store is available 24 hours per day. When a sale is realized, the buyers upload their personal and financial data on system trusting in the policies of confidentiality and security of the sellers. People of different generation or culture have different concerns and reaction about privacy, confidentiality and security data breaches.

    Since online business has been growing significantly and consistently for the past years, the group decided to conduct a research about the impact of security breaches on the behavior of college students’ as far as their online businesses consumption, using the eBay’s case as the foundation for this research. In February 2014, 145 million users of eBay were affected because their information such as name, date of birth, address, email address and password were hacked, and that kind of information could be used to do other crimes such as identity fraud (Prigg, 2014). The secondary research demonstrated that in US almost half of internet users had problems with online security (eMarketer, 2015). This project aims to determine whether Humber College students' online shopping behavior would be significantly affected by a published data breach. This descriptive research can help companies decide if they need to invest more in high cost IT security or risk an eventual lawsuit.

Research Problems and Objectives        

       The purpose of this study is to determine whether publicized breaches in personal privacy would change Humber Lakeshore student’s consumption behavior of online purchases during the fall semester.

• Identify the data of publicized breaches to show their impacts in personal privacy.
• Determine the risks of publicized breaches on Humber Lakeshore student’s consumption behavior of online purchases during the fall semester.
• Analyze the protection tools of Humber Lakeshore students and measure the change in consumption behavior of online purchases during the fall semester.  

Methodology

Research Design

The descriptive research design was used to conduct this research, although the group is aware of the problem as listed in the purpose of the research, the team do not know how much of the impact the problem on Humber College students is.

The most common method to identify the problem is using the quantitative and qualitative methods together.