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

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Re: What is Third Voice?

Author:	Jacob Savin
Posted:	9/17/1999; 11:33:18 AM
Topic:	New Third Voice version out
Msg #:	11235 (In response to 11106)
Prev/Next:	11234 / 11236

I've installed Third Voice, mostly because I want to see how it feels to use it. I think I've seen about three useful "notes" in a day-and-a-half, though this was one of them:

In response to the statement on http://www.thirdvoice.com/why.htm "Can you remember all those crazy Internet passwords or ideas about your work project or next vacation? Better than Ginko Biloba, Third Voice can help you get organized!", one user wrote:

Third Voice is suggesting I use it for my passwords. Jesus Christ Almighty! Now I KNOW it was designed by either 1) art students, or 2) high school students. Do they have no concept of security whatsoever? Where are the third voice personal notes stored? are they envrypted to prevent trivial access by malicious software? are they stored on the 3rd voice server? bah.

I had been already thinking about security WRT ThirdVoice, and it occurs to me that in addition to the security concerns this user expressed, there is also the possibility they stand to make huge amounts of money by selling demographic databases about their users. They may potentially know every URL you visit, and how often, associated with your name, and zip-code (which is more than enough to data-mine for more elsewhere). They even know what time of the day you surf the web. When you sign up, there is no place to explicitly tell them not to divulge or sell this information (or not to collect it). I find this fairly disconcerting. I'd say it's more problematic than the What's Related issue w/Netscape, because at least that service didn't directly correlate where you were with who you were.

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