That sense seemed powerfully confirmed in early 1999, when Scott McNealy, the chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems, was asked whether privacy safeguards had been built into a new computer-networking system that Sun had just released. Companies old and new are getting into the business. Just Got Cool. An outfit called Disappearing has developed an e-mail system that allows users to send messages that permanently unwrite themselves after a previously specified amount of time. Sales of personal paper shredders are up.
Personal bodyguards are increasingly in demand.
American Express has just unveiled a system called Private Payments , which generates a random, unique card number for each online purchase. There is serious talk of building privacy protection into the infrastructure of the Internet, and of using such protection, paradoxically, to make the flow of information freer than ever before. Billions of dollars are at stake. A new sector of the economy seems to be coming into being. Among entrepreneurs and venture capitalists it already has a name.