While reading the latest P3P working draft I started thinking about online privacy and how it could be enforced by a browser. My first thought is that the browser could just keep a list of personal information that you want to be kept private (so that it's never sent in any outgoing packets at all) or that you want to be warned about.
It sounds simple enough, but there are always issues. Two that come to mind are a potentially significant performance hit as the browser scans outgoing packets for personal information, and the local storage of that data which may be vulnerable to cracks and exploits in another branch of the information privacy war. Though I doubt that the majority of the information would be of much use to scanners, email addresses would definitely be among the protected strings, and these are very highly prized by bots. One more possibility is the accidental blocking of legitimate packets that just happen to include blocked strings by accident - a false positive.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - It's an idea, all the same, even if it's one that could use some work.
PPS - It's probably small enough to be made as a browser plug-in.
No comments:
Post a Comment