Objectives of knowledge management

8 Data protection 
Data protection has been referred to in depth in the previous section.
Environmental and green issues related to Internet usage 
The future state of our planet is a widely held social concern. Technology is generally seen as 
detrimental to the environment, but there are some arguments that e-commerce and digital 
communications can have environmental benefits. Companies can sometimes also make 
cost savings while positioning themselves as environmentally concerned – see Box 4.6 . 
Potentially, online shopping can also have environment benefits. Imagine a situation where 
we no longer travelled to the shops, and 100% of items were efficiently delivered to us at home 
or at work. This would reduce traffic considerably! Although this situation is inconceivable, 
online shopping is growing considerably and it may be having an impact. Research by the 
Internet Media in Retail Group ( 
www.imrg.org
) shows the growing importance of e-commerce 
in the UK where over 10% of retail sales are now online. In 2007 IMRG launched a Go Green, 
Go Online campaign where it identified six reasons why it believes e-commerce is green: