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June 21, 2004
AT&T Privacy Bird
I stumbled upon this add-on to Internet Explorer called AT&T Privacy Bird (http://privacybird.com/) which is this little colorful birdie that sits in the upper-right corner of your browser window (along the title bar, next to the buttons) and gives you both visual and audio feedback about the privacy policy of the website you're currently visiting. I really applaud their efforts on this project because I feel that it is an elegant solution and a wonderful proof of concept. People generally ignore privacy policies because they're long and boring, but we still do care about what is happening to our personal information. To give a very quick summary of the interaction: when you install the Privacy Bird, you specify your privacy preferences explicitly. Then, for each website you visit, the Privacy Bird looks at the privacy policy for that site and turns green and chirps if it matches your preferences, turns yellow if the policy can't be found, or turns red and chirps if the policy doesn't match your preferences. I have found, however, that in practice few sites have their privacy policies encoded in the P3P standard which the Privacy Bird requires in order to read them and so the bird is yellow (and therefore useless) most of the time. I do like the idea though, and find the ever-present bird and reminder chirps to be very persuasive in my surfing habits and what info I'm willing to give a site. Yahoo.com, for example, comes up red with lots of violations of my privacy preferences, and so I'm going to be much more careful about what info I give them in future. -JonPosted by at June 21, 2004 01:32 AM
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