Remember Amazon’s so-called Honor System, the online payment method? It raised a furor on privacy grounds. Sites using the Honor System were installing links to Amazon’s servers, thereby giving Amazon knowledge of other sites’ traffic — and the implied ability, which Amazon insists it’s not going to use, to see where its own customers were going online, at least the sites that used the Honor System.
Now consider the Microsoft Smart Tags scheme, which puts embedded links into browsers. The invasion of other people’s writing is bad enough, and has been examined — and denounced — by many people.
But Brett Glass, a programmer and writer, suggests possible other uses for Smart Tags. “If your machine contacts a Microsoft server, and feeds it information about the pages you’re visiting, Bill Gates now knows about every page you visit,” Glass says. “Do you trust him with that information? I don’t.”
A Microsoft public-relations person says Smart Tags are “not set up in a way that allows tracking.” The content databases are resident on the user’s machine, he says. (Richard Smith, at the Privacy Foundation, is also looking into this question.)
I’m glad to hear the Microsoft response. Even the possibility of tracking would be unnerving, given that millions of people have signed up for various Microsoft services, such as Passport, which could readily identify them when they were logged on. And given Microsoft’s determination that Passport be the sole authentication method for its HailStorm/dot-Net Web services, anything that would enable mass surveillance should be stopped before it starts.
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