'PrivacyPlace,' the Online Magazine for Personal Privacy, Launches First Issue; PrivacyPlace.com Offers News, Opinion, Advice, Community and Technology for Protecting Personal Privacy.

BERKELEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 1999--

PrivacyPlace, a new site designed to offer individuals ways to protect their personal privacy, is now online at www.privacyplace.com.

An online magazine, with news about privacy issues updated on a daily basis, PrivacyPlace includes opinions, advice, a forum for readers, an archive of articles on privacy, and a marketplace that recommends products and services available for protecting privacy. Future content includes product and book reviews, a developer's corner, and guides to encrypting e-mail and surfing the web anonymously.

PrivacyPlace.com is an effort to give people the tools, the information, and ideas on ways to protect their privacy.

PrivacyPlace Editor Tom Maddox is a science fiction writer, screenplay writer (he has written two X Files scripts with coauthor William Gibson), journalist, and essayist.

Maddox says PrivacyPlace aims to combine the creativity of a talented team of writers with the power of the Internet to create a publication that is lively, funny, insightful, and ultimately useful for anyone concerned with personal privacy. His credo: "We believe in the power of each of us to fight in our own lives for our privacy and in the social power of concerted action."

Regular columnists for PrivacyPlace include Mike Godwin, former legal counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Jacques Francoeur, CEO of The Privacy Gateway and expert in international privacy issues. In the first issue, special contributor George Smith, editor of Crypt News and longtime debunker of government myths about cryptography, writes about the Moonlight Maze -- the Russian infowar attack that never was.

A regular feature includes the Nosy Parker Award, which is presented to those who have egregiously trampled on personal privacy, and a regular column from an anonymous character known as Paranoid Paul, who issues a report from the road.

The Marketplace offers privacy-related software programs users can purchase for immediate download. There's also an ever-growing library of past articles on privacy, indexed by subject, and a Forum, where readers can talk with each other, with writers at PrivacyPlace, and with the editors.

PrivacyPlace is owned and operated by Lumeria Inc, an infomediary incubator. Lumeria was founded in 1997 by former computer journalist and industry analyst Fred Davis to provide technology solutions for the personal management of information and knowledge. Fred Davis is also the Editor-in-Chief of PrivacyPlace.

The publisher of PrivacyPlace is Colette McMullen, who also serves as Lumeria's VP of Sales and Marketing. Before joining Lumeria, McMullen was Group Publisher of IDG's Web Publishing group -- which includes Sun World, Java World, and Linux World -- where she cofounded the first profitable online publication.