Privacy? Pentium III is a blabbermouth, unless you shut it up. If Intel is so big on trust, why do they have so many lawyers?
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foxnews.com
Congressman chides Intel over new chip
1.06 a.m. ET (606 GMT) January 23, 1999
By Ted Bridis, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — A congressman wants Intel Corp. to reconsider plans to
give its upcoming Pentium III computer processor the ability to transmit across the
Internet unique numbers to help identify consumers.
Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., said that he understood the technology's
implications for online commerce, where the anonymity of the Internet can
encourage fraud. But he worried it also will help online marketers surreptitiously
track consumers on the Web.
"Intel's new product improves technology for online commerce in a way that
compromises personal privacy,'' Markey wrote Friday in a letter to Intel Chief
Executive Officer Craig Barrett.
Markey, the senior Democrat on the House consumer protection subcommittee,
urged Intel "to better balance both commercial and privacy objectives.''
An Intel spokesman, Chuck Mulloy, said Markey "clearly is missing some
information here.'' He said the company will contact the congressman's staff "to
make sure they understand the entire story.''
Intel announced its technology earlier this week at a security conference in San
Jose, Calif. Its new Pentium III chip, to be sold early this year, will by default
transmit its unique serial number internally and across the Internet to help verify the
identity of users.
Consumers can turn the feature off, but it turns itself back on each time the
computer is restarted.
Intel said the technology is needed to encourage trust in online sales and also can
be used to prevent piracy by preventing a single copy of a software program from
being installed on several machines.
To mollify privacy advocates, Intel said it will not maintain a master database of
consumer names matched to Pentium serial numbers. Intel also encouraged Web
sites and software programmers to warn consumers whenever the serial number is
retrieved. It predicted the first such Internet pages and software will appear within
months.
"The flip side of the coin for security is privacy,'' Mulloy said. "We acknowledge
there are certain risks associated with that serial number.''
Civil libertarians still found fault.
"The potential harm that this plan could do to privacy is pretty large,'' said Stanton
McCandlish of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San
Francisco. "It's just unfathomable they would come up with such an insecure
system, especially given the vast majority of users who are extremely concerned
about online privacy.''
The debate over Intel's new technology occurs as Congress considers whether to
propose new federal privacy laws for the Internet. The Federal Trade Commission,
which chided the online industry for its failure to protect privacy rights, successfully
pressed last year for a law to prohibit Web sites from collecting personal
information on children without their parents' permission.
Vice President Al Gore last summer called privacy "a basic American value, in the
information age and in every age.''
William McKiernan, the chairman of Beyond.Com and Cybersource Corp., said
electronic commerce sites on the Internet clearly need better protection from fraud.
When McKiernan's company first went online selling software in 1994, he lost
more sales to credit-card fraud in one week than he sold legitimately. The site now
verifies a consumer's identity using a technique that he licenses to other companies.
But McKiernan said the conflict is only beginning between the needs for privacy
and for positively identifying customers online.
© 1999 Associated Press.
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