published_or_final_version / abstract / Sociology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in the partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Commerce. Johannesburg 1996. / This paper addresses concerns surrounding information privacy and the secondary use of information in South African corporations. This study also attempts to assess the level of concern that management and information technology practitioners if! South African retail banks have about privacy issues. The research suggests that privacy is a huge concern internationally and may affect South African corporations if they do not follow certain policies and practices. Eleven in-person structured interviews were conducted at four banks. The research proposes a set of guidelines by which South African management and IT practitioners, who are involved with the identification and solution of some of the problems that may be presented by possible privacy legislation, will be able to assess their policies and practices against international practices and policies. The results inform IS managers and executives about appropriate business policies they can implement voluntarily to address public concerns about specific information practices that may be considered a threat to privacy. The findings suggest that the executives are deliberately avoiding confronting the issue of information privacy for as long as possible. The executives are adopting a wait-and-see attitude and will react 011 whatever legislation requires them to do. At the time of the report senior executives at banks were not accepting responsibility for information privacy policies and practices and were leaving this responsibility; to the middle level managers who implement their own practices based on their own needs. / GR2017

In recent years there has been dramatic growth in mobile devices and technologies. According to reports from comScore [1], 47% users in the United States (aged more than 13) are using a smartphones as their primary phone. Smartphone offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than contemporary phones. In today’s world, a user wants to keep their smartphones private, because of the personal information present in it. Among these users, some of them are minors. This thesis addresses the functionality to track/control the mobile activities of minors by their parents using mobile phones. As a parent they want to know, whom his/her child is talking to and for what they are accessing browser for. Cellular network companies are providing number blocking services from the carrier side, but those are monthly paid services. In this thesis, we propose application architecture for remotely control the child phone and grant access to selected numbers for call and text. We use the emerging Android mobile platform and Google nexus phones to implement and test the application. This architecture will help developers to make more innovative applications in future which helps parent to access child phone information. We performed a study and reported the result using the proposal. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.

This dissertation examines the underexplored importance of technology, and attendant forms of social organization, to artists, writers, and activists in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Third World era. "Signs of Neon" borrows its title from the 1966 junk sculpture exhibition 66 Signs of Neon, led by the artist Noah Purifoy, in order to signal the ways that for black thought in the period technologies were understood to not simply be "new" and future-oriented, but as part of processes of production involving waste and "junk," histories of racial capitalism, and the racialized distribution of people. It is also intended to signal the importance of aesthetics to both conceptualizing these relationships and to imaging them otherwise. The dissertation analyzes the technological thought of a diverse group of artists and theorists, especially, James and Grace Lee Boggs, Noah Purifoy, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Paule Marshall, Charles Burnett, and Martin Luther King Jr. It argues that this was seen as a contradictory moment: because of technologies like automation and cybernation it was potentially liberating, no longer necessitating that black Americans be productive for white wealth, and at the same time one where, as James and Grace Lee Boggs argued, black communities were being technologically "undeveloped." Exploring these potentials and contradictions meant turning to the historically contingent relationship between processes of racialization and technology that dated to plantation slavery. While this was done in explicitly theoretical ways, "Signs of Neon" argues that a significant strain of black aesthetic practice was focused on the technological and that attention to it expands the boundaries of the Black Arts Movement and The Black Aesthetic. Consistent with the era's anthologies, this is an inter-media dissertation. However, instead of works of cultural autonomy these works focus on the processes described above. They suggest that an experimental and capacious black aesthetic practice was a privileged mode for conceptualizing the period's complex technological forms of organization, as well as the aesthetics' capacity for imaging new relationships and potential futures not reproductive for racial capitalism. While this dissertation is a historical one, it's aesthetic and analytical concerns continue to be relevant. In ending it considers the contemporaneity of this group's thought to the present, and especially to what Francoise Vergès has recently termed the "racial capitalocene."

I investigate whether or not a firm’s social network size (also known as social capital) impacts the quality of its information environment. Following social capital theory, I posit three potential channels that help bring an informational advantage to wellconnected firms. First, well-connected firms are likely to have timely access to a broader set of information that affords them the opportunity to disclose this information. Second, a social network fosters trust among social peers, which promotes the transfer of more accurate information within that network. Third, well-connected executives and directors have greater reputational capital at stake, which may encourage them to provide accurate information to the market. I provide evidence that well-connected firms have higher quality information environments. I further document that the beneficial impact of the firm’s social network size on the quality of the firm’s information environment is higher for complex firms. I also find that the beneficial effect of the firm’s social ties on the quality of the firm’s information environment is greater when the firm’s connections are in the same industry or are top executives or are industry leaders or are financiers in the capital markets. My study extends existing social network literature by investigating whether firm’s social connections to outside executives and directors impact the quality of the firm’s information environment. My paper focuses on the networking skills of the executives and directors and extends the literature on how executives’ and directors’ personal characteristics are important. Additionally, I respond to the call by Engelberg et al. (2013) to identify the mechanism by which a CEO’s network creates value to the firm and well-connected CEOs get paid higher compensation. This study also contributes to a growing debate in social network literature between social capital theory and agency theory. Finally, my study is important to the regulators and standard setters as they can provide further evidence on the impact of non-financial information on the information quality surrounding the firm. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Communication technologies have become a central characteristic of workplace functioning. The literature has suggested that the use of these technologies fundamentally changes the manner in which team members interact. The present study sought to reorganize previous research on the impact of virtuality on team emergent states and behavioral processes to elucidate how different degrees of team virtuality shape team functioning, and to investigate the manner in which these relationships differ according to team type, team membership stability, and publication year. Findings from 174 studies (total number of teams = 9204; total N approximately 26,050) suggest that there is not a strong relationship between team virtuality and emergent states and behavioral processes. However, moderator analyses revealed that a reliance on highly virtual tools may be most detrimental to action teams and ad hoc teams. Moreover, findings demonstrate that the degree to which virtuality shapes team transition and action process may be changing over time.

As access to information changes with increased use of technology, privacy becomes an increasingly prominent issue among technology users. Privacy concerns should be taken seriously because they influence system adoption, the way a system is used, and may even lead to system disuse. Threats to privacy are not only due to traditional security and privacy issues; human factors issues such as unintentional disclosure of information also influence the preservation of privacy in technology systems. A dual pronged approach was used to examine privacy. First, a broad investigation of younger and older adults' privacy behaviors was conducted. The goal of this study was to gain a better understanding of privacy across technologies, to discover the similarities, and identify the differences in what privacy means across contexts as well as provide a means to evaluate current theories of privacy. This investigation resulted in a categorization of privacy behaviors associated with technology. There were three high level privacy behavior categories identified: avoidance, modification, and alleviatory behavior. This categorization furthers our understanding about the psychological underpinnings of privacy concerns and suggests that 1) common privacy feelings and behaviors exist across people and technologies and 2) alternative designs which consider these commonalities may increase privacy. Second, I examined one specific human factors issue associated with privacy: disclosure error. This investigation focused on gaining an understanding of how to support privacy by preventing misclosure. A misclosure is an error in disclosure. When information is disclosed in error, or misclosed, privacy is violated in that information not intended for a specific person(s) is nevertheless revealed to that person. The goal of this study was to provide a psychological basis for design suggestions for improving privacy in technology which was grounded in empirical findings. The study furthers our understanding about privacy errors in the following ways: First, it demonstrates for the first time that both younger and older adults experience misclosures . Second, it suggests that misclosures occur even when technology is very familiar to the user. Third, it revealed that some misclosure experiences result in negative consequences, suggesting misclosure is a potential threat to privacy. Finally, by exploring the context surrounding each reported misclosure, I was able to propose potential design suggestions that may decrease the likelihood of misclosure.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010. / Committee Chair: Mynatt, Elizabeth D.; Committee Member: Edwards, W. Keith; Committee Member: Grinter, Rebecca E.; Committee Member: McDonald, David W.; Committee Member: Potts, Colin. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

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