Baiting netizens with promises of increased privacy protection, Netscape Communications announced Tuesday its proposed technology standard for enabling personalization of Web services - but the initiative proposes no changes that would affect the current cadre of Net privacy issues.
The "Open Profiling Standard," co-sponsored by Netscape, Firefly Network and VeriSign is intended to give users greater control of the personal information they deliver to Web sites.
But OPS seems a bit lackluster given that it is being pushed as an addition to, rather than replacement for, the intrusive cookie method of tracking user information.
OPS would have users fill out profiles and preference information in a standard format that could be authenticated with a digital certificate. Developers could create standard applications that would tailor the user's experience on a site based on their personal preferences - potentially increasing the value of Web-based marketing and advertising.
The standardized format and brand names associated with the profile forms - which will be incorporated into the Communicator browser - should encourage consumer trust and therefore growth in the e-commerce market, a spokesman for Firefly said. But just how the proposed standard will benefit users - who must still put up with cookies - or marketeers - who may receive no additional data - is difficult to pinpoint.
"As far as I can tell, this in and of itself is not going to have a direct impact on advertising," said Karen Anderson, media director at the interactive ad agency ModemMedia. "It's a recommended platform and technology from which sites can develop their own privacy standards.... If used in a constricting manner can make users invisible to advertisers."
However, Jeff Dickey, vice president of business development at DoubleClick argued that people who elect not to disclose personal information, like those who choose not to accept cookies, "are typically not people an advertiser will benefit from putting their message in front of.... [OPS will give] individuals more control and advertisers won't have to pay to advertise where it doesn't help," he said.
OPS is built on top of two technical standards that are slowly gaining acceptance in the Internet community.
The first one is vCard, a format managed by the Internet Mail Consortium, that simply specifies how personal information is stored. The vCard format allows programs to quickly read a variety of information including a person's name, phone and fax numbers, address, and email.
The other component of OPS, digital certificates, is making its way through the Internet Engineering Task Force, a standards group. A digital certificate essentially gives a guarantee from a trusted third party that a person is really who they say they are.
Building on these emerging standards, the idea behind OPS it that users will be able to control how much information about themselves is disclosed to a Web site. A site will ask whether it can get information, and using the vCard format, the user will be able to determine what, if any, should be made public.
"Cookies are involuntary information about you," said Paul Hoffman, director of the Internet Mail Consortium. "OPS is voluntary information about you."
But cookies are not likely to disappear, at least not initially. "It will be up to each Web site [to decide] whether they want to use cookies or OPS," Hoffman said. "My guess is best sites will go to OPS. But we will not know how useful OPS is going to be until people start using it."
So far OPS has gained the support of 60 big-name high-tech firms and privacy advocate organizations, including American Express, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, IBM, The New York Times, Sun, and Yahoo - with Microsoft conspicuously absent from the list. The proposal will be submitted this week to the Worldwide Web Consortium, which oversees Internet standards.
