CDR: Re: The Market for Privacy

[matthew gream]

Tim May wrote:

>Fact is, most people don't think they need security. Most people don't even 
>think they need backups. Until their hard disk crashes. And so on. It's a 
>tough sell in either case.

There are similarities to conventional society where people don't think that 
they need to save money for retirement, until they find themselves old, 
without much to live on, and expect the state to look after them. So maybe 
some privacy technologies need to be forced into use, through some means - 
maybe even the social consciences (even if only for self interest) of 
technologists -- people don't always know what is good for them until its 
too late (that will offend some people, but it is a hard to deny fact).

My thinking is that sometimes in general it is possible to see that certain 
technologies are going to develop, but not see their exact manifestation. A 
good example of this is the Internet - people saw the "information highway" 
coming, but did not see that it would be "the Internet" or WWW - some of 
these technologies hit mass penetration, only after which it becomes 
apparent that they are deficient - for instance, the immaturity of WWW as an 
information structuring medium viz. SGML, hypermedia technologies and so on.

What I am leading into is - perhaps ZKS will die, and perhaps what will 
happen is that other commercial needs will drive forward a mass penetration 
of something like smart card hosted identity management systems, used for 
banking, health care and a plethora of other situations which are more 
relevant to the daily life of most people. But, perhaps using this 
infrastructure, ZKS like and other privacy systems can operate.

Perhaps I am a skeptic, but I see millions of people who have an immediate 
need for banking, healthcare, mobile phones and other operations before they 
have a need for identity management - it is an important, but yet still 
obscure, thing. So I see something like a smartcard hosted identity 
management system, which can be a platform for ZKS (and others?) to build 
upon for a myriad of other applications.

The other area where I thought that ZKS could get a "leg on", is with 
providing privacy infrastructure for digital exchanges and negotiation 
systems. Could freed0m be good basis for providing anonymity and trusted 
virtual networks over potentially insecure physical networks ? That's 
relatively lightly thought through speculation on my behalf.

Lucky Green wrote:

>It appears that ZKS is yet another company that fell prey to the >DigiCash
>"we know better than the market what the market wants" syndrome. What a
>shame, really.

In my opinion the basic technologies look good, but the commercial front end 
hasn't found a good home yet, maybe ZKS will stumble along for a while until 
it finds a better place for itself to fit. It seems as though the market 
will be there, but perhaps the volume is too small at the moment.

Best regards,
Matthew Gream.





_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at 
http://profiles.msn.com.