Day 7 Thoughts
wE2g7q Extremely easy by words but in reality�, a lot of things don`t correspond. Not everything is so rosy..!!
Lifelock
LifeLock is another consumer "reputation protection" company (more focused on identity fraud) with a pretty interesting business/marketing model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeLock
- However LifeLock has had many many problems, discussed in this article from Wired Magazine including one of the co-founders having been an identity thief himself, the CEO's identity has been stolen successfully a number of times, and there is currently a pending suit against the company claiming its business model isn't legal.
- Yeah, LifeLock is definitely controversial. Didn't mean to imply that it was "good", just "interesting" :)
Opt-Out Programs
Incidentally I believe that CAN-SPAM requires that opt-out has to be free to the user. CAN-SPAM failed for a lot of reasons, whereas the do-not-call registry has comparatively succeeded--would be interesting to discuss why.
Transfer of Ownership
What happens when formerly trustworthy companies get sold? Should the data submitted by users be transferred? This is a very real threat--Friendster and Spock were recently acquired (the latter by Intelius--see http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/29/spock-and-intelius-uh-oh/). Mint.com was also acquired by Intuit, but imagine if they had been acquired by a telemarketing firmâ¦
Mozilla Privacy Icons
We have created an internal page on this wiki for Brainstorming Ideas for this project
I'm still not convinced that there is an actual problem here to solve (or rather, whether the problem is so severe as to require the hammer of a browser icon convention). In some ways I feel like people have already voted with their widespread usage of sites like MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and Google despite the lack of a privacy icon.
It is worth noting that the icon-in-the-browser-to-signal-privacy already exists in one form today--the "lock" you see when performing credit card transactions over SSL. It'd be interesting to examine the origin of this convention. I'd argue that in this case there *was* an actual problem to solve (and that users probably would not submit credit card information without the lock, so that users and businesses had a strong incentive to come up with a convention--adding the lock increases conversion rates).