Data Integrity - Sources Of Faulty Data

The integrity of data can be compromised in a variety of ways, including malicious proprietors, human mistakes, and technical error. Unfortunately, like accurate information, faulty, inaccurate, or misleading information also travels freely on the Internet and consumers and companies alike have been negatively affected by it.

Fraudulent business schemes account for a significant amount of erroneous information on the Web. In this scenario, sellers often make faulty or exaggerated claims about products and services that sometimes do not exist. According to Nua Internet Surveys, a study by the Worldwide E-Commerce Fraud Prevention Network found that 50 percent of businesses in the United States saw online fraud as a significant problem. Ten percent of those companies ranked online fraud as their "most significant problem." Among those surveyed, half had experienced losses between $1,000 and $10,000, and 19 percent in excess of $100,000. Online auctions were among the leading areas of e-commerce fraud in the early 2000s. Nua Internet Surveys reported that the U.S. Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC) registered more than 20,000 complaints in its first six months of existence. Sixty-four percent of the complaints involved auction fraud.

In addition to information that is simply unreliable or inaccurate, the integrity of data can be compromised in other ways, including technical errors that happen during data transmission. Along with the growth of e-commerce came an increasing reliance on software programs that automate tasks involving databases of customer information. This opens the door for computers to accidentally execute tasks that affect thousands or tens of thousands of people at a time. Before the advent of e-commerce, mistakes usually involved a handful of customers, or at least could be caught in time to avert a major disaster. Although consulting firms, software developers, and leading companies all devote resources to this problem in their own ways, technical error was still a major concern in the early 2000s and no one solution existed that ensured the integrity of information during all Internet transactions.

A more simple source of technical errors, which some e-commerce developers were dealing with in a variety of ways, involved limitations of Web technology. Traditionally, Web servers (the computers or software responsible for maintaining and storing Web sites) break off connections with clients (individuals using Web browsers like Microsoft's Internet Explorer) after a Web page has been downloaded to their screen. This means that when consumers view a Web page, it may become outdated in a matter of seconds. Products that were available when the consumer initially downloaded the Web page may become unavailable several seconds later.

Errors were also attributed to online shopping carts—the technology that keeps track of items consumers are interested in until they are done shopping on a Web site. For example, if someone removes an item from their shopping cart before checkout because they don't want it and then clicks on their browser's "back&rquo; button to revisit a Web page they just saw, it is possible that the unwanted item will be added back to their cart. Other similar sorts of mistakes can happen with online shopping carts.

Human mistakes as well are sources of compromised data. In October 2000, Buy.com agreed to a $575,000 class-action settlement when, due to a human data-entry error, it mistakenly priced a computer monitor at $164.50 instead of $564.50. Buy.com honored the price for the monitors it had in stock. However, when it refused to fulfill all of the orders it received, consumers sued. Around the same time, consumers threatened to sue Egghead.com for a similar blunder. The retailer mistakenly priced a $335 computer component at $34.85. Before the mistake was noticed, Egghead.com had received thousands of orders, which it cancelled.