He was asked by the Clinton administration in March 1999 to review federal, private-sector and international privacy issues as the field of information technology grows. The Clinton archive will be Internet based. Swire, who will return to OSU from Washington in January, said he suggested the idea of hosting the site to the supercomputer center. It was clear during yesterday's conference that no one has found a way to keep consumer information private while retaining business' right to use the data they collect. Last year's financial modernization act required banks, brokerages and insurers to give customers the chance to opt out of having private information shared.
Businesses have until next summer to comply with the rules.
Other online businesses, particularly those involved with health care and marketing to children, are creating their own policies. Web sites would create privacy policies and encode them so that a surfer's Web browser would download them automatically. Surfers could specify within their own browsers how much information they want to share. Companies would translate a Web site's privacy policies into the P3P format, and if it matched the individual's preferences, nothing would happen. If not, the browser would issue a warning to the computer user, who then could go elsewhere.