Home > Archive > July 11, 2000 > Advisors
Partial page image followed by the entire text. A few links have been added. Related link: Winograd and Privacy Concerns
Personalization raises privacy concerns because it requires a trade-off: to gain the benefits of a customized Web experience, the user has to give up personal information. The problem for users is that once revealed, this information is too often out of their control; sites’ privacy guarantees are deliberately vague, and there’s little or nothing to stop businesses from trading user profiles among themselves, selling them to ad agencies, or matching them against offline identities. As users become more aware of these practices, they become less inclined to make the personalization tradeoff---unless they can retain control over their personal information.
Xamplify guarantees the user exactly this control. We are working with trusted privacy companies to develop a highly secure privacy infrastructure. Our users will have the ability to share as much or as little personal information as they want--and will retain the right to opt in or out of the system at will. Xamplify software will protect their private data and online interactions from surveillance, and will grant or revoke corporate and institutional access to it through informed choice.