candidate work area for Interest Group (now)

Consumer Protection at the Point of Sale

Credit cards have brought us the capability to buy and sell
retail items over the phone.  And this has opened up various
thriving abuses.  Merchants now have business rules ensuring that
the user is carefully briefed on everything in the virtual
invoice before the sale is committed.  But there are still lots
of abuses and consumer protection professionals have a hard job
trying to reach potential fraud victims before the scam artists
get to them.

The Web offers the potential for the customer to have better
information and more control over the process surrounding a
transaction as compared to voice communication by telephone.  But
there is also a potential for abuse as with any new way of doing
business.

The way to achieve an industrial-strength accessible WWW is to
check out planned Web reforms in scenarios that will be
encountered in the timeframe that the reformed Web will be in
use.  And not just the most benign scenarios.  Web commerce is
one scenario which we certainly want to be common as the WAI
reforms come into use, and which merits high standards of
completeness of information and security of user control.

It may take a fresh dialog among government and mercantile
stakeholders to come up with a believable scenario of business
rules providing consumer protection at the virtual point of sale.
Then we should take this draft set of business rules for Web
business transactions, and check out how it plays as we vary the
browse mode of the consumer.  This is one important stress-test
for the technical features we draft to support disabled
accessibility.  If the blind Internaut can submit the betting
form from the racetrack but not read the attached Truth in
Lending warning, we may not have a solution, yet.

The Interest Group can work on the consumer protection scenario
treating the World Wide Web as a black box.  The Working Group
can work on browse-mode-diversity technology concurrently with
this effort.  Down the road we bring the two drafts together.

Is this timely or premature?

Do we have the right kinds of people engaged in the process yet?

Are there better scenarios to be laying out to be used in
walkthroughs and demonstrations?

--
Al Gilman

Received on Thursday, 26 June 1997 20:37:33 UTC