PrivaSeek Aims to Establish Java Privacy Standards.PrivaSeek Inc, the first company to launch itself as a privacy infomediary, has formed an ad-hoc grouping of Java developers to attempt to drive the development of APIs and specifications for privacy applications. Infomediaries are firms that sit between web sites and users and control the flow of data back and forth. It is looking define standards for all "privacy-aware" applications and interfaces to services providers to enable companies like PrivaSeek to offer users a standard way of controlling what data gets supplied to web site owners. Steve Lucas, PrivaSeek's CIO CIO: see American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. (Chief Information Officer) The executive officer in charge of information processing in an organization. and government relations senior VP, says the company has already "had a significant amount of people sign up" at the firm's web site. He emphasizes that this is not a PrivaSeek-centric effort and the company will accept whatever standards the group settles on. He says an open source development model will be employed and PrivaSeek will offer parts of the source code of its client software to aid the effort. PrivaSeek says it will support all the existing privacy standards, including P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) A protocol for sharing private information over the Internet from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A Web site's privacy policy is defined by the Webmaster answering a standard set of multiple-choice questions, which result in and OPS Ops (ŏps), in Roman religion, goddess of harvests. She was the wife of Saturn, by whom she bore Jupiter and Juno. At her festivals, the Opiconsivia and the Opalia, held in August and December, respectively, she was worshiped as a goddess of sowing and its work is said to have the support of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium, www.w3.org) An international industry consortium founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee to develop standards for the Web. It is hosted in the U.S. by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT (www.csail.mit.edu/index.php). , which is embroiled em·broil tr.v. em·broiled, em·broil·ing, em·broils 1. To involve in argument, contention, or hostile actions: "Avoid . . . in a struggle to disprove a patent claim by Intermind Corp on a crucial part of P3P (05/04/99). Lucas says he's spoken to Danny Weitzner, technology and security domain leader of the W3C and the two have agreed that this effort is complementary to P3P, not competitive. And anyway, says Lucas, PrivaSeek's software is based on OPS and vCard, so P3P compatibility is very straightforward. A major target for this work would be Novell Inc's Digitalme infomediary-enabling tool, which is written in Java. Lucas says he plans to meet with Novell officials later this month. There is a meeting of the privacy advisory committee of the W3C on Monday before the start of the 8th International WWW WWW or W3: see World Wide Web. (World Wide Web) The common host name for a Web server. The "www-dot" prefix on Web addresses is widely used to provide a recognizable way of identifying a Web site. conference in Toronto. http://www.privaseek.com |
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