Not Only Security and Privacy: The Evolving Ethical and Legal Challenges of E-Commerce

The coronavirus pandemic has influenced nearly all the aspects of people’s lives, including their shift to purchasing online. Along with the changes, the known ethical and legal issues of the e-commerce grew in significance; there also appeared a number of new, unprecedented challenges. This paper presents the results of a novel study aimed at identifying the most significant ethical and legal issues of e-commerce that appeared alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, or grew in significance because of it. The study also sheds light on the evolution of human knowledge and understanding of these challenges, driven by an unprecedented reliance on e-commerce during the pandemic.