Are we e-safe?

Legislation of e-commerce has been employed so as to protect every aspects or elements that may be included in the e-commerce environment, the consumer and producers as well as any data security and integrity. Every area of businesses nowadays is surrounded with circles of boundaries composed of appropriate rules and regulations. These legislations serve as the transparency of every transaction that is done online or any transactions involved in the e-commerce ‘world’. So that every actions done between any processes or between customers and businesses, shall be appropriately guided and make sure every step will be done accordingly, starting from the consumer moving through the internet into a merchant’s website and see a prospect product to finally exchange of electronic cash for payments. Also will make the players of the e-commerce environment be legal in their every ways and these laws should always be observed and complied.

The Philippine government became the third country in Southeast Asia with legislation to promote and protect electronic transactions when Former Pres. Joseph Estrada signed the e-commerce law and was ratified on June 14, 2000, called as the Philippine Electronic Commerce Act (Republic Act 8792) (Lallana, E. & Quimbo, R., April 2008). This would cover any individual in the Philippines that also includes electronic transactions. The Philippine e-commerce act is based on UNCITRAL (United Nations Commission on International Trade Law). The UNCITRAL is a UN organ tasked to plan model laws wherein the member nations may adopt this for them to employ for themselves organized legal administration for businesses and trading, and this was gradually embraced by the Philippine government.

With all these precautions, a set of rules and regulations were laid upon the course and boundaries of e-commerce, national or international, we may all be just relax and believe the rest is assured and we could all just be sound. As for the issue brought up that questions the legislation of satisfying the demands of both the government and consumers, although every defense has already been built-up, there could also be room for breach or area for any not-so-secured transactions and anything could be just as subjective for compromise. With the Internet having the power of reaching across the world, it is inevitable that legal issues would be involved that involves intellectual properties, copyright, trademark, privacy and the like relatively predominantly on the business side. Our technology today is so fast paced, and everyone becomes the player. And the population of these players is really hard to control. A very challenging task is posed for the authorities or for these laws to fully control the e-commerce or harmonize everything as it should be. Even laws that do not concern the e-commerce world even experience breaches and loss of assurance. With regards to the state of our country solely, that we are just starting to adopt these technology, and everyone is not yet acquainted to it, it seems that there’s more to this that we, Filipinos, should understand still. As everything goes entirely electronic, we can’t stop questioning on how such laws could be fully applied to the world of cyberspace. It seems very hard to fathom thinking that cyberspace or the Internet is such another big world that we humans have still yet to learn more, wherein everything seems to be done so freely. For example, purchasing hardware locally could give you bigger chances of retaining your right if ever the hardware does not function well, you could just go to the store where you bought that stuff and complain or charge them. But in the case of purchasing it online, you may have bought it from the other part of the world, and in times of problems that what you bought was defective, you really have little chance to fight for your rights.

I have read many counteracts or precautions taken to ensure the ‘safety’ of all that is involved in the digital world and I hope that these could be taken as universal as in everything is standardized entirely for the whole world so securing might be more efficient as soon as possible. The legal issues imposed could be handled easier in the nearest time we could have. That these governing rules and regulations would be as fast paced as technology is, and that human can still control the ‘wire-ness’ were becoming. And that we could prove that we still have control over the technology and not let it become a tool for more crimes and anomalies but just room for more developments for our kind. To sum all the situation up, the legislation could not yet somehow satisfy the needs of the government because, even the authorities are still having a hard time, incorporating such laws and how it could be applied. It seems that we still need more understanding of applying a ‘cyber law’ to a ‘cyber world’. To my view, although e-commerce or digital cash seems to be already an old stuff, mastering to play in this kind of industry wherein everything would be fully regulated and taken under control, is still needed very essentially knowing that everything is not constant and unpredictable. So for short, we should make everything predictable and keep up with whatever is happening inside the digital world. It would just be a matter of taking control of the things, I mean; we already have other laws aside from these e-commerce laws and we managed to control things with these laws, so it would not be that impossible to also incorporate ourselves with the cyber laws.