All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Can your favorite Web site tell your favorite browser how it will use your personal data? Can your browser negotiate terms of use with the site before releasing your name and number?
The answers are no, and no. But Microsoft and the nonprofit privacy program Truste don't want the Web and its users to give up their long-held hopes for a Web standard that can deliver personal electronic privacy.
That's why the companies launched the Privacy Wizard Tuesday, a service meant to help Web sites fulfill their half of the privacy bargain.
"The AltaVista search engine has indexed about 180 million pages. For them to be of any value to end-user applications, those pages have to say something about who they are," said Saul Klein, executive vice president of Microsoft's Firefly division. "We're giving those pages a language to talk."
"The conversation can only start if Web sites speak P3P [the Platform for Privacy Preferences, a still-absent Web privacy protocol]," Klein said. "And we're starting that conversation today."
Joel Reidenberg, a law professor at Fordham University, cautioned that consumers should see the move as a very preliminary step in a still data-vulnerable Web.
Privacy Wizard was the centerpiece of joint announcements Tuesday by Microsoft, Truste, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all bent on making privacy a structural and technological component of the Internet.
Reliable privacy safeguards must exist before consumers will feel comfortable enough to surrender personal information, allowing the Web to fulfill its potential as a commercial dynamo.
