Clickshare is owned and managed by
people who believe passionately in protecting consumer privacy --
especially the sanctity of a user's information-acquisition records.
Clickshare achieves this objective because it does not record personal
information in its logging database. This information is held only for
the
user's chosen Clickshare Service Provider, and by any Content Providers to
which the user
releases this information.
DETAIL:
Several years ago the seamy video-cassette renting habits of a famous
Washington politician were reported by the City Paper, the DC alternative
weekly. This provoked a furor and resulted in several states adopting
laws which made it illegal for cassette-rental stores to reveal what their
customers are renting. It is not hard to imagine similar laws being
adopted -- without any reasoned thought at all by lawmakers -- if examples
of this kind of misuse of Web-browsing preference data come to light.
Proprietary online services and some portals have records of where their
users "click." They have to have this information in order to compensate their
content providers. They do not purposefully use this information to track the
personal habits of their users. But the mere fact that they HAVE it, and that
it is parsable by actual user name, is the danger. Because, in law, if you
HAVE the information, no matter your intentions, you can be compelled to
provide it.
That is what is different about Clickshare. In the Clickshare system, only one
entity need possess the actual name of a user -- the user's chosen Independent
Clickshare Service Provider. The Clickshare-enhanced server software resident
on the home site's Web server assigns a random alpha-numeric string to that
user. That alpha-numeric string is used by the Clickshare backend to
differentiate discrete visits to sites and for assembling chargeable
information access by users. But only the user's Clickshare Service Provider
can associate this alpha-numeric string with an actual named individual -- or
with a billing account.
Thus in the Clickshare environment, there is NO CENTRAL DATABASE of names.
Names
are held by individual Clickshare Service Providers and those providers are
responsible to their users as to how those names are used. Typically, when
users register for Clickshare at a service provider, they are asked if they
wish their demographic information to be used commercially or restricted; and
providing demographic information is voluntarily.
In the Clickshare environment, individual Service and Content Providers will
respond to the marketplace's demands for privacy in determining the level of
intrusiveness into the private browsing of their users; if you as a user do
not like the way Foo Bar Newshare is proposing to use the data they keep on
you, you may become Clickshare-enabled through a more privacy-sensitive home
base. In either case, you may be certain that Clickshare not only won't use
personal information about you, but that it can't, because it doesn't have it.
A question-and-answer exchange which considers the privacy
issue more deeply may be found here.
For a graphical depiction of how Clickshare works, visit
How it works
