Bill Gates says Microsoft hopes to resolve key issues in online privacy and data security over the next two days. New privacy options will be available in the next generation of Microsoft software.
"These issues will become more important as we evolve in the direction of what we call the dot-Net future," said Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, at the kickoff of SafeNet 2000.
The invitation-only conference is aimed at forging an accord between consumer advocates, government officials, security professionals, and companies seeking a stake in the e-commerce future.
More than 200 top-level experts -- including officials from the Department of Defense and the Federal Trade Commission, heads of industry consortiums, and consumer-rights advocates -- planned to discuss privacy, consumer trust, and data security during the day-and-a-half summit.
"In an era where the Internet is increasingly central to our lives at work, at home and at school, it is more important than ever that our industry give customers the assurance that their information will remain secure, respected and private," Gates said in a later statement.
Vital to the .Net vision
Resolving such issues is of particular importance to Microsoft's .Net vision, in which common PC applications become Internet services and data is synchronized among a host of personal devices.
Still, questions arise over whether consumers concerned with privacy will allow their data to be managed by companies that, in many cases, count others' personal information as a corporate asset.
"What that means is that information that used to be controllable (by consumers), now for matters of convenience, has to be replicated to all of those devices (and across the Internet)," Gates said. "The concerns of who has access to that data will rise to new heights."
Gates also showed off a demo of Internet Explorer 6 using a privacy-policy notification technology known as Platform for Privacy Preferences Project, or P3P.
The technology allows Web sites to encode their privacy policies in a format that is readable by browsers.
Select your privacy level
Users can set IE6 to one of five degrees of privacy, and the browser will alert them -- via a red exclamation point at the bottom of the screen -- when the current site has a policy that violates their stated privacy preference.
Double clicking on the exclamation point will show the users what aspects of the site violate their privacy.
Gates also said that Microsoft intends to use smart cards -- credit cards equipped with a secure chip for holding data -- to better protect its systems and source code.
The card has to be inserted into a reader connected to the PC in order to log on, and when it is removed, the PC locks itself.
Such cards have already been issued to Microsoft system administrators -- those with the authority to create new accounts and delete old ones, he said. Picking the experts' brains Gates stressed that the intent of the seminar was not to tell others about Microsoft's plans, but to learn from the experts and incorporate that thinking into Microsoft's products.
"In all the releases we are doing in our products, the concerns we are discussing at this conference will be a key input in what happens in the future," he said.
"This is not a zero-sum game of picking a trade-off and expecting people to live with that."
