Ethics, Privacy, Security and Trust Issues in Virtual Communities and Collaboration

Companies that use the power of the Internet to interact with external agents to reduce costs and gain market advantages face some serious security, privacy and ethics issues. The communities that are implied in this article and arise when the company cooperates with customers, government and partners, have great potential for building a high-quality and efficient infrastructure of services and methods in the field of interaction with external forces and their analysis. Within the general trend, which shows that more and more business processes are becoming virtual, there are no practical recommendations for managing virtual communities for business. This paper will describe how to conduct virtual interaction with external agents for business, and how to build an architecture of systems to avoid possible problems related to confidentiality, ethics, trust, security and improve the management of the enterprise’s virtual environment as a whole.