Bring higher standards to Internet reporting

One of the biggest problems facing the Thai Internet market is the large number of immature and unprofessional websites. In order to create legitimate growth of the Internet market in Thailand, businesses depend on customers who trust that their private information is being handled in a secure fashion.

To this end, it should be expected that the media reports on websites have been investigated. Good journalists realise press releases should be verified. This is to insure that the media is not reporting incorrect or misleading information. Most news stories require the consultation of several sources in order to validate a source.

In the same way, journalists should be validating the claims of new technologies and new websites. For example, a Thai English language newspaper recently reported the launch of www.mislily.com [August 9] as a new online flower shop. Besides being an unprofessionally designed site, it does not use a secure SSL connection (meaning credit card numbers can be stolen during transmission), does not use credit card validation or error checking, and has a huge security flaw allowing someone by clicking only the "back" button in the browser to view a previous user's credit card number.

The daily, in this case, has reported a substandard, unsafe e-commerce website by not doing the proper research to make users aware of these dangers. This shoddy reporting harms the growth of Internet in Thailand and the integrity of online businesses.

As a suggestion, I recommend the media develop a certain set of standards and verifications as a way of determining what new technologies are appropriate to be reported to a mass audience, rather than just picking keywords like "B2B" and "e-commerce" and slapping it into a news story.

Bryan Blair