Microsoft Passport And Your Privacy

An Anonymous Coward sends us this link to a prediction about Microsoft's Passport service. Probably a lot of truth in it; I'm sure Microsoft uses it as a user-tracking system more than anything else.

Comments

Great...but can we stop it?

[don_carnage]

We've all sat back and watched how Netscrape has floundered in the market, giving IE even more of a consumer edge. Opera is a great browser, but who is going to pay for it when you can get the others for free.

Eventually, services like "passport" will be built into your Micro$oft browser or even operating system! Ever noticed how they're trying to integrate everything?

The "techies" will always have the privacy edge, because we know how to set up proxies and firewalls and use alternatives to popular browsers. Hell, I've even gone back to using Lynx sometimes.

The problem is this: Joe Consumer who doesn't understand computers or the internet isn't going to object to this sort of thing because it makes his/her life easier. Unfortunately, there are a whole lot of Joe Consumers out there capable of voting into law some pretty scary privacy violating legistlation.

The only thing we can do is to get involved in the technical side and help prevent stupid legistlation from interferring with our protocols and standards.

don (steps down from soapbox)

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