Clash of Internet Privacy Policies. The New York Times suggests that privacy features of the latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser are creating unintended consequences.
In fact, the problem may be that the quest for a standard, such as P3P, has locked some sites and some browsers into different and conflicting states. Rather than define the technology, it is probably best to define the goal and let a thousand privacy flowers bloom. The role of an industry or privacy group, then, would be to actually critique the different privacy approaches and let users decide for themselves how to approach different sites.
A good and potentially profitable service would be a buddy app that browsed with you and, before allowing changes in privacy states, let the user make the decision to proceed or not. It could be populated by a central database of privacy reviews and operate like Brewster Kahle's Alexa, before Amazon bought it and eliminated the useful parts, which showed both background information about a site and the popularity of a site. This app would show the user in a glance whether other people were trusting a site -- it could incorporate easy-to-use user rating systems so that users could have a voice in the information displayed. A self-organizing solution to privacy would arise. It's an example of what Howard Rheingold calls "smart mobs."
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at October 13, 2002 09:49 PM | TrackBack