A good idea that will (never?) happen
by naisan on Apr.11, 2007, under "the man", e-commerce, innovation, privacy, tech industry
IBM, Novell, and Parity Communications are talking about blind encryption to allow internet surfers to anonymously visit, and indeed transact with sites.
Of course, their project is the right thing to do, in terms of privacy, security, and in keeping the status quo.
Now – the “status quo” statement above should make you think. Isn’t that changing the “status quo?”
Before the digital tech era, the “web” era (so let’s say 10 years ago for the average person) people couldn’t effectively track all of your purchases, what you looked at, where you went and what you were interested in, and then target you with advertisements.
Anonymity was the status quo.
Now – let’s consider why this effort is doomed in terms of commercial success. Even a nascent system, such as e-commerce over the web, has built up powerful interests and requires a somewhat stable transactional model. Today we know the game: You come to my site, I track you and entice you to disclose, I advertise to you, and then I sell you something (eventually).
If I can’t track you, and can’t profile you, and don’t know what you bought, and actually am thwarted from developing ideas about you, then my model is in trouble.
No web merchants are going to participate in transactions with this type of system voluntarily, and most will oppose it if necessary.
So success for this effort demands massive demand for incremental privacy from people like you and me, which history has shown virtually never happens — not for privacy or any other perceived incremental advancement.
There are a bunch of caveats, and there are ways that this could work, and I would love for that to happen.
But I’m not waiting around.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
-
-->
April 16th, 2007 on 23:58
i think their product could fare well in the marketplace given the fear mongering about identity theft and spam. the advertising campaign would be easy to come up with.
that said, you’re probably right about websites putting restrictions on allowing that sort of anonymous interaction.
until then, i just leave my trail around the web, eating cookies along the way so others can follow my crumbs.