Real Privacy Protection


Regardless of whether you agree with the view that you have no right to privacy, protecting your privacy through rules and laws can never be as effective as real protection for our information. Real protection exists everywhere, and these protections will continue to be improved as long as there is a market for them.

New technologies will continue to offer increasing protection for our information. You can disable cookies on your browser to prevent marketers from tracking you on the Internet, or you can use anonymous browsing services, such as Anonymizer.com, that allow you to browse the Internet without giving up any information to anyone. At some point you'll have access to anonymous payment services that will allow you to pay through them without disclosing your identity to the person you're paying. It'll be just like cash on the Internet. Encryption technology has already existed for years, but almost nobody encrypts their e-mail. Is that because we don't care about privacy, or because we don't think it's our responsibility to protect our own information? Either way, once e-mail encryption is widely used, you'll be able to trust the security of your e-mail. Other forms of anonymous communication will develop over time. Intermediaries, such as online bill payment services, could become our mask for all online payments and deliveries. They could act as our agent online, and we would only need to trust their privacy to ensure our identities are kept private in online transactions. No one would know who we really are, except the intermediary that acted as our online agent. A retailer simply needs a mailing address and money to transact with us. They may want to know more about us, but they don't need anything more than that. If consumers show an overwhelming demand for privacy and retailers don't provide the appropriate protections, then intermediaries will step in to play that role. Imagine that your online name is "1156454321," and your address is a P.O. Box owned by Paytrust.com (or another bill payment service). You can even change your online name every month, so no one can track your name for more than 30 days. Paytrust pays the retailer for you, and your retailer knows nothing more than your ID number and Paytrust's address.

That is just one example of a solution to a specific privacy concern; there are numerous parallel examples of real solutions for protecting our information. Through a combination of improving technologies, more privacy sensitive businesses, more privacy sensitive consumers, and intermediaries willing to mask our identities when dealing with any "untrusted" parties, we have a strong set of real solutions to protect our privacy without the help of anyone but ourselves and the market.

If we protect our own information through real tools that prevent the information from getting out in the first place, then we don't need any further protection. Protecting our information once it's already in the wrong hands is much harder than protecting it from getting into those wrong hands in the first place.




The CTO Handbook. The Indispensable Technology Leadership Resource for Chief Technology Officers
The CTO Handbook/Job Manual: A Wealth of Reference Material and Thought Leadership on What Every Manager Needs to Know to Lead Their Technology Team
ISBN: 1587623676
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 213

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