Privacy is supposed to be this year’s hot issue in the internet industry – with a couple of government imposed deadlines designed to concentrate the minds of companies in the US and Europe – so it is appropriate that the subject should also be occupying the mind of the person credited with inventing the web, Tim Berners- Lee, who was speaking on the first day of the seventh W3C conference, which is being held this week in Brisbane, Australia.
Berners-Lee, a director of the W3C who invented HTML, said security is not the big deal everyone thinks it is because of the widespread availability of encryption software, but he acknowledged that security has become a problem for governments trying to prevent criminals from using the internet to conduct their operations.
The W3C is working its way through its Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) initiative, which is meant to provide a set of standards regarding the collection and distribution of information over the web. But more significantly, the European Union issued a directive to its member nations to have a uniform data protection policy in place by October 28 this year, and the Clinton administration issued its framework for electronic commerce on the internet on July 1 last year, giving the industry one year to come up with ideas about developing data protection and privacy policies (CI No 3,343).
