At 8:28 AM -0800 3/2/00, Richard Fiero wrote:
>>From the WSJ:
>----------------------
>Intuit Acts to Curb Leaks On Quicken to Ad Firms
>
>By GLENN R. SIMPSON Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
>
>Personal financial information that consumers key into Intuit Corp.'s
>popular Quicken Web site has been leaking out to advertisers, and the
>company moved swiftly to address the problem.
>
>A design quirk in some e-commerce Web sites allows sensitive information
>that consumers provide about their personal habits, tastes or finances to
>be attached to Web page location codes used by third parties such as
>ad-placement companies. In the case of Intuit, both a mortgage-calculator
>and a credit-assessment feature on its Quicken site collect information
>from customers regarding income, assets and debt, and then send the data to
>DoubleClick Inc., a company that sells and places advertising on Web sites.
>DoubleClick says it doesn't keep any of the data it receives.
>
>The "data spillage" problem, discovered by Richard M. Smith, an
>Internet-security consultant, appears to be widespread and isn't limited to
>personal-finance sites. Among others, retailer Buy.com appears to be
>sending Double Click the titles of videos its customers are searching for
>on the site.
It is wrong to buy the new line that this is "leakage" or "spillage." When
Buy.com sends titles of videos to Double Click, this is PRECISELY what
Double Click was saying a month or so ago was its new business model:
buying and selling customer clicks.
After the firestorm of protests hit, Double Click stock began falling, and
several companies are "distancing" themselves from Double Click. I believe
Amazon just announced that they will develop other suppliers of the
click-through information, suppliers with a less-Orwellian policy.
Now the coverup is in full force: "Selling is leakage, monitoring is
spillage, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."
--Tim May
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
