And that privacy policy must include provisions for consent, disclosure and access, said Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters Corp. and an outspoken privacy advocate. You don't give out that information. Some companies have even built software products that offer personalization with privacy. New York-based YouPowered Inc., launched three months ago, has a desktop application called Orby and a server application called SmartSense that map a site's privacy policy to Platform for Privacy Preferences standards. Using Orby, customers can share as much personal information as they want with sites that have installed SmartSense, which is a simple, rules-based personalization engine that enables users to set one of four privacy levels.
Customers have access to information gathered at the site at any time.
But YouPowered's software has been slow to catch on. To date, there have been only 2,000 downloads of Orby, a free product, and only four sites are using the SmartSense beta. This month, the company released a free download version of SmartSense, called SmartSense Consumer Trust, to spur adoption. Whether this technology will ever catch on is debatable. Until now, it hasn't, Catlett said.