One-Way Contracts: Consumer Protection without Law

One-Way Contracts: Consumer Protection without Law

What if consumer contracts were legally enforceable only against the consumers, but not against the business? This paper, part of my project on the ‘myths of consumer protection,’ describes a regime of ‘one-way contracts’–contracts between consumers and business to which only consumers are bound, the business is not. A breaching business would face no contractual liability. The paper argues tha...

Consumer Protection in Electronic Contracts

Consumer is weaker party in electronic contracts, especially business to consumer contracts (B2C). There are various legal systems in place to protect consumers. However, consumers still face a variety of problems. For example, they do not have enough choices in the markets and often have difficulties in understanding contract terms. More importantly, consumers still do not always have effectiv...

Secrecy without one-way functions

We show that some problems in information security can be solved without using one-way functions. The latter are usually regarded as a central concept of cryptography, but the very existence of one-way functions depends on difficult conjectures in complexity theory, most notably on the notorious “P 6= NP” conjecture. This is why cryptographic primitives that do not employ one-way functions are ...

The Protection of the Consumer Under Modern Sales Law

Measuring one-way metrics without a gps

The forthcoming Internet will support applications that are able to tune their operation using data about the availability of network resources. A key issue in this perspective consists in the identification of significant metrics that can be measured without using specialized hardware and with low overhead. We define two such metrics, and we introduce a prototype implementation of a measuremen...