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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Fiondella who wrote (26234)	3/23/1999 11:00:00 AM
From: Rusty Johnson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

Novell To Market Privacy Protection Software Filed at 5:43 a.m. EST By Mo Krochmal for TechWeb, CMPnet Novell on Monday announced a software product that would allow consumers more control over how much of their personal information is given out over the Internet. At its annual users' group meeting Monday in Salt Lake City, Utah, the company, which builds applications that link computers into networks, unveiled a software program that allows consumers to store personal data like bookmarks, cookies, preferences, user IDs, credit card and contact information on a PC, according to a report in The New York Times. The software would act like a firewall between Internet sites and the data, allowing the user to control how much personal information a site could see. "Managing identity is the key to creating networked communities and establishing trusted relationships among the myriad people, applications, services and devices that now populate the Net," Novell chairman Eric Schmidt said in opening the Novell conference. Privacy and control over personal data are emerging as one of the flash points in the development of electronic commerce. Already, there are huge offline databases that aggregate personal data like income and spending habits. The Internet has made it easier to collect even more specific data and to mine it in real time, raising deep concerns among privacy advocates. Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy said it best during the launch of his company's embedded technology, Jini, when he declared the privacy fight lost. "You have zero privacy anyway, get over it," he said. Novell said its Digital Me software would allow the user to more finely control the data that a website could see. Citigroup and credit card provider First USA would test new services based on the software, expected to be released in the third quarter of the year, the company said. Privacy advocates were optimistic. "If this makes it possible to be totally anonymous on the Internet, it's a step in the right privacy direction," said Jodi Beebe, spokeswoman for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse of San Diego, Calif., an advocacy group. "It should be free to consumers. Charging someone to be anonymous on the Internet would be a major drawback." Novel will sell and license Digital Me technology, but will make the client software freely available under open source terms. David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, said there was no digital fix to protect privacy online. "I don't believe that technological means can always provide a substitute for legal protections for privacy," he said. "Technology and laws are needed together. If this is just a substitute for the legal protection of privacy, it's not adequate." Novell is not alone in engineering a scheme to help consumers protect the privacy of their data online. Recently, Microsoft announced the creation of an electronic wallet that would contain and protect such information at its online service and across its network of partnerships. Zero Knowledge Systems, a Montreal-based software company, plans to roll out a service similar to Novell's. Available in beta in April, the product called Freedom will let users assume different identities online, controlling who they appear to be and what information they reveal. "You have to win trust," said Austin Hill, president of Zero Knowledge Systems. "We give you the tools to be private. We do it by saying: 'Don't trust us, trust yourself.' " (c) 1999 CMP Media Inc.