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

To: Frederick Smart who wrote (26376)	3/31/1999 10:43:00 AM
From: Paul Fiondella	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Does Citicorp get it? The strength of protecting access to a digital identity vault and doing verification of a person placing an order in an ecommerce transaction at the vault not at the vendor is that Citicorp will have minimal fraud losses in ecommerce. Protect your customers identity and you protect your vendor from theft of goods by someone impersonating your customer. The advantage to keeping the customer rather than the vendor in charge of the information in the vault is that the vendor doesn't have to build up a database and perform his own verification with it. Tremendous cost savings accrue to the vendor. Automate your billing of customer and vendor at the same time and you create a new service --- a monthly report of all of the vendors transactions to the vendor. Once again a cost saving to the vendor. If the identity of the customer escapes your identity vault then you lose the whole advantage of the technology. ============== The only limitation on theft today on the internet is that the vast majority of people are honest in the first place. Throw the rest in prison and throw away the key. Or just deny them the opportunity in the first place with digitalme.

To: Frederick Smart who wrote (26376)	3/31/1999 11:59:00 AM
From: PJ Strifas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

It does seem there's a dual message here but let's stand back for a moment and look at these 2 statements. We all know where the first one is going - empowering the individual (who is greater than the sum of all parts). The second statement seems to me to be the notion that some people will allow certain places to cater to specific needs if they can trust the source. In other words, I wouldn't mind if let's say a portal were to cater to my websurfing needs whereby I would allow them access to information such as relationships I have with other websites (IE, Amazon.com, SI, ESPN, etc). I don't mind someone having that information AS LONG AS I CAN TRUST THEM to keep it to themselves. Which is what digitalme is all about. Thus a portal subscribing to the inherent privacy needs of its customers would gather and KEEP them. I think this is where Dr. Schmidt was going with this. Businesses can create a trusting relationship with it's customers (we tend to think only in the end user mindset - what about extranet services for business-to-business transactions?). Let's face it, some portals or companies will REQUIRE certain information for you to be a "member" or to have a relationship. Let's not forsee this as Draconian. I don't think that will be the case. But for arguements sake, there are some instances where an address WILL be required (for shipping purposes). If a website or company gets this information, I want digitalme to "govern" it's use. If for example this company decides at some point to "sell" the info, digitalme should have a mechanizism to notify me when this info is re-used. In other words, if I get unsolicited email from a company who obtained my info in the above mentioned way, I should know that the first company "sold" my info thus giving me a way to track what happens to my info. Then I can make decisions on which relationships I want to keep or trust. digitalme would then take on a great role than just Identification only. It would then really allow me to "control" my personal information. See, someone having my information isn't bad, it's when they use it in an unintended way that's unacceptable. It's almost ZEN-like, having knowledge and not using it is just as bad as not having the knowledge in the first place OR like having a cure for cancer - if we don't use it, do we really have a cure for cancer? All this technical chat is great, the real war on this will be on the ideological and philosophical planes.....let's hope we use more than just dollars and cents to make the right decisions. Peter Strifas