At 6:15 AM -0800 on 10/29/00, Phil Agre wrote:
It is often held that Internet privacy problems will be eliminated by a new class of online third parties called "trusted intermediaries". The idea is that, instead of visiting Amazon.com directly, you would visit Trustme.com, and then you would go "through" that site to get to Amazon. Now, this scheme can work at a basic level if Amazon doesn't have to know anything about it. That's what Zero Knowledge Systems http://www.zeroknowledge.com/ is doing. But that only works if the relationship between the customer and the vendor is relatively simple. A third party that requires Amazon's cooperation, for example because of its distinctive interface for processing pseudonymous requests for sensitive personal information, seems much less plausible to me. What company is going to allow an intermediary to get between it and its customers? Amazon? Bank of America? It doesn't seem likely. They'd have to worry that the intermediary would add its own services or take money to redirect the customer to competitors. Those firms could feel compelled to cooperate with an intermediary if the intermediary became well-established, but if most online marketplaces become monopolies or near-monopolies then this isn't likely. Trusted intermediaries are not an entirely useless idea. But like most companies pioneering new technologies they will have to establish themselves niches in the short term before they can even understand the nature of the problem in the long term.
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R. A. Hettinga