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The advantage to computer users is that they can decide how much information they want to reveal while limiting their exposure to intrusive marketing techniques. The advantage to Website entrepreneurs is that they learn about their customers' tastes without intruding on their privacy.
Many online consumers, however, are skittish about leaving any footprints in cyberspace. Susan Scott, executive director of TRUSTe, a firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., that rates Websites according to the level of privacy they afford, says a survey her company sponsored found that 41% of respondents would quit a Web page rather than reveal any personal information about themselves. About 25% said when they do volunteer information, they lie. "The users want access, but they don't want to get correspondence back," she says.
But worse things may already be happening to their E-mail. Many office electronic-mail systems warn users that the employer reserves the right to monitor their E-mail. In October software will be available to Wall Street firms that can automatically monitor correspondence between brokers and clients through an artificial-intelligence program that scans for evidence of securities violations.
"Technology has outpaced law," says Marc Rotenberg, director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. Rotenberg advocates protecting the privacy of E-mail by encrypting it with secret codes so powerful that even the National Security Agency's supercomputers would have a hard time cracking it. Such codes are legal within the U.S. but cannot be used abroad--where terrorists might use them to protect their secrets--without violating U.S. export laws. The battle between the Clinton Administration and the computer industry over encryption export policy has been raging for six years without resolution, a situation that is making it hard to do business on the Net and is clearly starting to fray some nerves. "The future is in electronic commerce," says Ira Magaziner, Clinton's point man on Net issues. All that's holding it up is "this privacy thing."
Rotenberg thinks we need a new government agency--a privacy agency--to sort out the issues. "We need new legal protections," he says, "to enforce the privacy act, to keep federal agencies in line, to act as a spokesperson for the Federal Government and to act on behalf of privacy interests."
Wired's Kelly disagrees. "A federal privacy agency would be disastrous! The answer to the whole privacy question is more knowledge," he says. "More knowledge about who's watching you. More knowledge about the information that flows between us--particularly the meta information about who knows what and where it's going."
I'm with Kelly. The only guys who insist on perfect privacy are hermits like the Unabomber. I don't want to be cut off from the world. I have nothing to hide. I just want some measure of control over what people know about me. I want to have my magic cookie and eat it too.
--With reporting by William Dowell and Noah Robischon/New York and Declan McCullagh and Bruce van Voorst/Washington