[ga] Re: [Politech] Plaxo meets privacy criticism at PC Forum conference [priv]
Declan and all,
Well this seems typical of and "Esther Dyson run" gathering/thinkfest,
yet another fiasco, much like her term as COB of ICANN and recently
her skewed efforts with the ALAC or attempt at yet again forming
and AT-Large for stakeholders/users for representation within ICANN..
Declan McCullagh wrote:
> http://online.wsj.com/barrons/article/0,,SB108034639134766783,00.html?mod=b_this_weeks_magazine_tech_week
>
> Plaxo Blasted at Tech Forum
>
> IT WAS OLD HOME WEEK for some wonderboys of the go-go Internet craze at
> the PC Forum conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., last week. Among the
> attendees were Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com's CEO; Pierre Omidyar, eBay's
> chairman, and Tim Koogle, the former chief executive of Yahoo! But not
> everyone had a good time at the annual thinkfest, run by Esther Dyson,
> chairwoman of EDventure Holdings, publisher of the Release 1.0
> technology newsletter.
>
> Prime example: Koogle was sitting on a panel about the evolution of
> searching on the Internet when the crowd got ugly and turned on him.
> Koogle, who also worked at Motorola and sits on the boards of about a
> half-dozen start-ups, is a director of Friendster, the social-networking
> phenomenon, and a director of Plaxo, a service that updates e-mail
> address books. And it was his affiliation with Plaxo that put him on the
> hot seat.
>
> If you haven't been "Plaxoed" yet, here's how it works: Users of Plaxo's
> free service can download the company's software to their computers,
> which copies the persons' contact database and stores it on Plaxo's
> servers. A user can ask Plaxo to send out a blast e-mail to everyone in
> his address book and ask them to update their information. But when the
> person who receives the message responds, he or she is directly
> connected to Plaxo's Website, which secretly leaves a software probe on
> the recipient's computer. The controversial company has many
> technophiles worked into a lather over a number of issues, including
> privacy, intrusion and trust.
>
> During the question-and-answer period following the panel discussion, a
> number of conferees attacked Koogle as though he were the second coming
> of Bill Gates. One man referred to the company's service as unsolicited
> spam. Others griped that it was simply creepy. Lastly, and perhaps the
> biggest concern, is the issue of what happens to all of that data if
> Plaxo is someday acquired?
>
> For now, Plaxo executives -- who include Napster co-founder Sean Parker
> -- insist that privacy is Job One, and that if the company were sold,
> users would be able to retrieve and erase their data from Plaxo's
> computers before the acquisition was completed. Koogle, who appeared
> taken aback by the verbal onslaught, said not to worry -- even if Plaxo
> were to get snapped up. "If a lot of the company's value proposition
> relies on that trust, the acquiring company will respect that trust," he
> argued.
>
> Most folks in the audience weren't born yesterday; they're sophisticated
> users of technology and the Web. And they surely remember that a similar
> argument was made regarding credit-card information and other data
> submitted to e-commerce outfits during the bubble years. However, once
> the Internet market began to crater, dot-com users found that their
> personal information was being bought and sold as, in turn, companies
> were bought and sold, or they folded.
>
> The audience also wanted to know if the free service had a business
> model yet. To which Koogle responded: not really. The private company is
> experimenting with two different approaches, one aimed at consumers and
> another pointed at corporate users, he said. That didn't instill a lot
> of confidence among the skeptics.
>
> [...]
>
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Regards,
--
Jeffrey A. Williams
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