Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Microsoft Disconnect

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:7/21/2000; 10:30:24 AM
Topic:Microsoft Disconnect
Msg #:18877 (In response to 18872)
Prev/Next:18876 / 18878

Bryant Durrell: But the screen shot Dave posted shows a dialog box that allows you to make any behavior the default -- so the quote above is inaccurate. How close is this guy to the actual product? Is there credibility?

Ah, I noticed this right away, too. The browser is asking a privacy-related question by default, and giving the user the option to have it stop asking, taking either choice as the default. AFAIK, this is the best possible solution to the stated problem.

More generally, as people become more and more conscious of how their privacy is or is not respected online, more and more such features will be demanded by users and more and more such questions will be asked and either defaulted on or not. At some point, in the aggregate, the answers to the questions will suggest being grouped and named ("name and address" for a certain class of questions, "phone numbers," "bank account info," etc.) so that the granularity of deciding what to answer and what not to doesn't become so fine as to be overwhelming.

At that point you have an interesting connundrum: making sure that human-meaningful names map precisely onto specific security constraints. There's an excellent paper, describing "Pet Name Markup Language," on this very subject at <http://www.erights.org/elib/capability/pnml.html>.

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