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Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

8-2021

Culminating Project Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Information Assurance: M.S.

Department

Information Assurance and Information Systems

College

Herberger School of Business

First Advisor

Dr. Abdullah Abu Hussein

Second Advisor

Dr. Jim Q. Chen

Third Advisor

Dr. Lynn A. Collen

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Keywords and Subject Headings

social commerce, privacy, security, trust, vulnerability, taxonomy

Abstract

Social networking has been a fertile ground for the growth of e-commerce businesses. Different business companies are using marketing techniques to target more consumers using these social media platforms to do e-commerce for their sales growth. Various social commerce activities like sales, marketing, and payment procedures play a vital role in thriving the business. But there are some vulnerabilities in this emerging social commerce technology that can put the user’s security, privacy, and trust aspects at stake. The vulnerability can be either on the system end or on the user’s end (vendor or consumer). The objective of this paper is to identify the security and privacy problems that exist in s-commerce technology and to increase awareness in people who are using this technology. The first part of this paper would be discussing in detail social commerce and its evolution on social networking platforms in the past few years. Then, social commerce activities would be identified, and a detailed taxonomy would be presented about the security, privacy, and trust vulnerabilities of s-commerce. Lastly, possible gaps in the field of s-commerce would be discussed and recommendations would be provided to consumers to protect themselves from s-commerce fraud. This paper will be served as a reference for practitioners, scholars, and users to learn more about the security and privacy issues of s-commerce.

Comments/Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to my Advisor Dr. Abdullah Abu Hussein, and committee members Dr. Jim Q. Chen and Dr. Lynn A. Collen, for their continuous support, criticism, encouragement, guidance, and excellent feedback. I would have not accomplished my master’s degree successfully without their expertise and wealth of knowledge. Special gratitude goes to my husband Adnan Khan, my daughter Aleeza Khan and my in-laws for their continuous emotional support, patience, and love; my parents Naim Khan and Neelofar Naim (Late) for their blessings and countless sacrifices they made for me; my brothers and sister-in-laws especially Sumera Nasim for their enormous motivation; and lastly I would have not completed this dissertation without the valued ideas from my friends Deepika and Mala.

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