CDR: Re: The Market for Privacy
matthew gream
matthewgream at hotmail.com
Fri Nov 3 07:16:33 PST 2000
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.
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