Privacy concerns have led eBay and Yahoo to shut down auctions that sought to sell a mailing list with the names, addresses and phone numbers of more than 200,000 active U.S. investors. America Online said it plans to scrap a customer-tracking feature in a software product that speeds file downloads, as the online giant faces a lawsuit claiming the offering can be used to eavesdrop on consumer habits. A lawsuit filed in June and amended Thursday alleges that AOL subsidiary Netscape Communications' SmartDownload product can send information about user downloads to the company. Years Later . In a world of disembodied strangers, the issue of trust is com- plicated.
Some governments seem to think there's a simple solution-just make everyone trackable.
The British government, for example, talks quite a lot about nonrepudiable digital signatures without ever acknowledging that a piece of electronic information is never going to be perfectly bound to a human. An e-commerce site sent me a message saying the certificates built into earlier versions of Netscape were expiring. A federal appeals panel has narrowed the power of police to search the homes of hundreds of thousands of California criminals who are on probation and suspected of federal crimes. The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that probationers' homes can only be searched under the terms of probation. By now most of us know that employers may legally monitor or censor messages sent over company e-mail wires.