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One of the recurrent spam genres that bemuses me is the various shills reading something like "Investigate anyone, anywhere!" or "Find out ANYTHING about ANYONE quickly!" I mean that are there really enough folks out there interested in "investigating" somebody over the Internet to make such services profitable? I suppose there must be. Some people have to much time on their hands. Try as I might, I can't think of one person I would want to investigate, but then, I'm not very nosy. Another Web related issue that I can't get very excited about is obsessive concern over "privacy," but let me qualify that; I don't want anyone getting into my bank records (or other money related things), but I consider that more of a security than a privacy issue. Other than in financial matters, privacy on the Web is not a big concern for me. I'm prudent enough that I wouldn't send any information that really required security (not that I have a lot of traffic in that sort of thing anyway) by e-mail, but if some busybody has nothing better to do then hacking into a server to read my relatively boring correspondence, I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over it. If you have nothing to hide, digital snoops are not really much more than an aggravation. As Sun Microsystems CEO Scott MacNealy asserted back in 1999, consumer privacy issues are something of a "red herring." "You have zero privacy anyway," MacNealy commented. "Get over it." However some folks beg to differ. A Harris Interactive survey commissioned by the National Consumers League found that: 56 percent of Americans said they are ``very concerned'' about the loss of personal privacy, outranking major social issues such as health care, crime and taxes. Among the issues the poll presented, only education elicited more concern (58 percent). 64 percent said they are very concerned about sites passing along information about them to others without their knowledge, and 71 percent said it is "absolutely essential" that companies ask for consumers' permission before using their personal information for any purpose other than the A Business Week/Harris Poll found 92 percent of Internet users worried about Web sites sharing personal information with others. A study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported similar findings, adding that 94 percent of respondents said Internet firms and their top executives should be punished for privacy violations.ÊA Ecom-Ohio report found that 45% of consumers would not engage in e-commerce due to privacy concernsÊ Privacy paranoia didn't start with the Internet, of course. Back when I used to use postal mail enough to make having an envelope letterhead worthwhile, mine included my telephone number. A friend of mine who is susceptible to conspiracy theories was aghast. "You shouldn't publish your phone number on the outside of an envelope," he admonished me. I didn't get it. What was there to worry about? Obscene phone calls from postal workers? The flap over Internet "privacy" leaves me similarly nonplused. I suppose spam is a sort of privacy issue, but a seemingly intractable one. There are days, when I check one of my e-mail addresses to find 30 messages, 27 of which are spam, that I would love to have some sort of e-mail death-ray that I could send back and fry the guts out of the sender's server, but spam seems to be part of the price of using e-mail. I detest telemarketer phone pests who call you up at inconvenient times trying to sell you something you don't want, too, but I haven't heard anyone suggesting giving up telephone service because of that sort of bottom-feeding annoyance. What got me going on this topic was reading Toby Lester's cover story on the new technology industries that are being built around privacy paranoia, in the March, 2001, issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Lester documents start-ups like Zero Knowledge Systems of Montreal, which offers a product called Freedom 2.0 -- a free computer program that taps into a network of participating Internet service providers, providing users with the following features: • Personal Firewall - Protect your PC from malicious hackers
For a $49.95 a fee, you can add the company's premium package, which Lester describes as "an impenetrable cloaking device," which wraps information in multiple layers with strong encryption, providing as many as five and traceable, anonymous digital identities with which you can surf the Web and send e-mail. Freedom's "military-grade" encrypted email system works with your existing email account to ensure that no one, including your ISP, can intercept and read your messages. Freedom also blocks unsolicited bulk email (spam) from reaching your inbox, and erases the "tracks" you leave when you browse the Web, Telnet, and post to Newsgroups or Chat rooms. Currently, Freedom is available only for Windows 95, 98, ME , 2000 and Linux. The company says it has had reports of successful Freedom installation and use on Virtual PC for the Mac, but this has not been tested and is not officially supported. Zero Knowledge's creators, Austin and Hamnett Hill, say their objective is to make encryption so simple that it will become to privacy what Netscape was to the Web -- "the ultimate consumer privacy tool." But do we really need "the ultimate consumer privacy tool?" some people obviously think so. Another company profiled in the Lester article is Lumeria, whose founder and CEO is Fred Davis, former editor of MacUser and PC Week magazines. Davis told Lester that "privacy is perhaps the biggest social issue of the Internet age, and today's practices don't just suck, they're downright unconstitutional!" Lumeria's object-oriented software infrastructure components are developed using Java and XML, and can by used together or separately for a wide range of business uses, including privacy protection, proxy services, XML security, and identity management (including digital signatures and secure profiling).ÊLumeria has also developed a proxy platform (the SuperProxy) that can allow many types of applications to be run directly from the edge-of-the-web without the need for the usual client software download. Lumeria's model is that the individual should be in control of what information is shared with various entities such as Web sites, other individuals, or commercial contacts , in a comprehensive way so that the user will have control over whether and how it is revealed and protected. Lumeria's SuperProfile system provides a proprietary solution to balancing an individual's right to privacy and to control their information with a company's need to know about current and potential customers to assist in customer acquisition, interaction, service, and retention. Lumeria believes that consumers will ultimately demand control over their private information and refuse to surrender it without an adequate assurance of privacy protection and value exchange. According to the company, the SuperProfile system benefits both buyers and sellers by allowing trusted agents, brokers and auditors to share profile information, at the request of the individual consumer, with marketers, merchants, content providers, or other consumers.Ê "Basically," Davis told Lester, "we created a new piece of Internet infrastructure for the secure communication and authorization of transmissions across the Internet... The consumer has complete control for the first time." Cool, I guess, although I don't consider the need for such a service as being a big priority for me. Perhaps I'm just shortsighted. Macleans magazine recently quoted Alex Fowler, Zero Knowledge's San Francisco based vice-president for policy and advocacy, predicting that it won't be long until every citizen maintains multiple identities for various online activities in, such as shopping , interacting with government agencies, chat rooms , etc., as a means of maintaining control over what they reveal about themselves and to whom. "Identity management is a skill not many of us have today," said Fowler, "but we'll all have to develop it." One privacy tool available to Mac users is PGP Personal Security 7.0.3, which provides encryption security for email, files, folders, and disks. PGP Personal Security has an easy-to-use tool bar you can use to encrypt your data so that it is accessible only to yourself or someone you authorize. Additionally, its personal firewall with intrusion detection keeps potential hackers from breaking into your computer. For $39.95, PGP ("Pretty Good Privacy") Personal Security promises to:
PGP Personal Security provides extra strong encryption to secure your hard disk from prying eyes. PGP software creates a "virtual" drive that instantly encrypts files when you store them and decrypts files when you access them. And with password protection, you can ensure only you have access to your data. The program makes it easy to communicate securely with others. With its new Self-Decrypting Archive feature, PGP Personal Security allows your recipient to decrypt files without having to own a copy of PGP. They simply double-click on the self-decrypting file and enter the password that you encrypted the file with. Sharing confidential information has never been so easy and secure. PGPnet can also transparently encrypt network communications between your computer and other machines on the Internet. System requirements:
For more information, visit: Toby Lester cites Alan Westin, who is something of a pioneer in the privacy field, having published a study entitled "Privacy And Freedom" way back in 1967. Westin defines privacy as "the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others. Westin proposes three general categories of concern over privacy: 1. "Privacy Fundamentalists" make up about 25 percent of the population, and are deeply concerned about privacy rights and potential invasion of privacy, and consequently reject any consumer benefits that require oversight of their activity or release of information about themselves. 2. The "Privacy Unconcerned" who don't care a whole lot about privacy, don't have any problem with giving their personal information away, and don't lose any sleep over how that information might be used. They make up about 12% of people. 3. The largest cohort (63%) are "Privacy Pragmatists," who are willing to balance the potential benefits versus the potential hazards of sharing information, but who are particularly concerned about "function creep" -- the secondary use of information or originally divulged for a particular purpose. They are prepared to trade off a degree of privacy protection, provided they get something in return and are not being axed exploited. Personally, I guess I'm on a cusp between categories two and three. One of the most interesting points addressed in Toby Lester s article was how the development of secure and efficient financial cryptography on the Internet could produce both commercial and consumer benefits without compromising privacy. For example, Lester quotes Robert Hettinga of the Internet Bearer Underwriting Corp. Internet Bearer Underwriting Corp. (IBUC), a startup established in 1999. Hettinga believes that in the digital age, financial privacy can be cheaper than financial transparency. Hettinga notes that his firm is developing the technology to execute "functionally anonymous bearer-cash systems that do very small streaming transactions," -- down to a thousandth or even millionths of a dollar. He suggests that IBUC micropayments could be a workable solution to the Gotterdammerung being slugged out among consumers, musicians, and the recording industry cartels over music swapping over the Internet. Hettinga proposes that users of a service like Napster could pay tiny amounts each time they download a piece of music, which would not be financially onerous, but on sheer volume would allow artists and the recording industry to still make lots of money -- perhaps even more than under traditional music distribution protocols. Sort of like supermarkets, which operate on razor-thin profit margins, but prosper on the economies of scale. Sounds like a good plan to me. So something useful may evolve from the concern over privacy. You can read Toby Lester s (very long) article on privacy here:
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