Raising the shield of anonymity Analysis/Commentary Privacy remains a bugbear in the absence of any determinable harm to consumers. However, with the increase of traffic on the Web and the e-commerce explosion, some "what ifs" become worrisome. What if a business decided to log your purchases along with your name, address, surfing patterns, and so on? You would become a dossier, a cardboard figurine on a gameboard controlled by powerful professionals. What if the police or other authorities decided to pre-define "weirdoes" or "potential offenders" through the same strategies? Wouldn't the Net become a one-way mirror, a holding cell for millions of suspects? The trend toward converting social snapshots into indices to behavior poses a problem in a world where freedom all too often requires anonymity. And with the multiplication of posted regulations, video cameras, paper profiles, and other organizing markers, the world becomes as paranoid as Kafka could ever have imagined. Now we need to worry that our every typed communication to a form-requiring website will be tabbed, tallied, and tailored to exploit us for good, bad, or through some random displacement of bureaucratic whim. Thankfully, the World Wide Web Consortium proposes a solution: the Platform for Privacy Preferences, or P3P. This Internet code standard allows users some control over data-collection over the Web. Microsoft and Netscape have agreed to implement it in future versions of their browsers. Privacy invasion, while a boon for big business, scares away new Web users (especially in Europe), as well as savvy purchasers and civil libertarians in the United States. Website privacy statements serve as insufficient protection against predation since even trusted corporations might contain groups whose unsupervised activities lurk behind the general veil of trust or implied honesty. It's hard to forget that not so long ago, the FBI collected dossiers on citizens based on innuendo and suspicion. The machinery of the Web undoubtedly remains porous and probably the best security efforts of authorities in business and government involve trying to safeguard credit card numbers, transfers, balances, banking account information, and other sensitive financial traffic. But being easy to hack by definition, the Web is also easy to manipulate by means of cookies, registration forms, or even e-mail. The above-board nature of these communications offers no guarantee that they won't be combined or sifted in objectionable ways. If businesses turn to hacking, citizens will lose their freedom to move unhindered and unwatched. In George Orwell's novel, 1984, the powers that be maintain social control through a two-way "telescreen." Unruly individuals are identified and marked for re-education or elimination. If the Net offers this kind of power to the agents of social control -- whether governments, moral majorities, or fanatical proponents of conformity -- they will be tempted to use it to crush the random springs that make life new and redeeming. November 3, 1999