A: Because the user relationship is with our Clickshare Service Provider web sites, and not with Clickshare itself, a decision of how access data is sold or used is up to the Service Provider in conformance with the wishes of the end-user subscriber. By leaving this relationship at the local or topic-specific level (as in subscribers to a fishing magazine), there is likely to be far more accountability to the wishes of the consumer and -- most important -- lots of opportunity for the consumer to shift allegiances to another "home port" if he does not trust what is being done with information about her.

Think of the bank credit-card analogy. You can get your card from Citibank or from Working Assets or from a bank that works with AOL, or Compuserve or Excite or some other portal. We expect there will be many "fronts" on the Clickshare(sm) back end, each with the potential to have a slight different pitch to the idea of user privacy vs. the marketing value of demographic data.

For users who want to pay $3 a month and get no privacy there might be one option; for those who want no one to know anything about what they are doing and want never to see an advertisement, the cost might be $25 a month. A range of such possibilities is possible with Clickshare's Digital Calling Card (SM), "reverse cookie" technology.

Q: You say users are asked if they want their demographic information used commercially or restricted and providing demographic information is voluntary. Is the user able to block ALL outgoing information except the actual transfer of charges? I.E., is the correlational tracking info about individual user accesses, preferences, and the like, albeit without user name/demographics, blocked?

A: The key goal of Clickshare is to provide the mechanism necessary to "settle accounts" when users registered by a set of independent Clickshare Service Providers access the content of the entire set. The idea is the users register at one site, but have access to the entire suite of sites without authenticating at each site. If a user registered at Service Provider A accesses some information at Content Provider B, there needs to be a mechanism to get the fees paid by the user back to B. That's Clickshare.

A natural by-product of this system is the record of usage. In addition to its utility for settlement, third parties (especially advertisers) have an interest in who is accessing what. As with enterprises in other media, sale of this access information can be used to drive subscription rates down, or boost profits.

Q: Privacy concerns are supposedly addressed by purging the user's name, address and the like from the information sold. It's sort of like Big Brother watching, but you're wearing a mask, right?

A: Not at all. The Big Brother analogy fails completely to describe Clickshare(sm) because it is so highly distributed. In our model, users register with only one Clickshare-enabled site. The user gives this site all the necessary credit, address, and demographic information along with a suite of preferences. Optionally, the user may elect to tell the site never to give out demographic information to third parties, and also may elect to have records of usage privatized. This site is the ONLY organization that maintains that information.

Now, when a user wants to start a session within the Clickshare universe, he authenticates himself at this site first. The site then registers that user with the Clickshare service for a discrete period of time (say, 1 hour). Upon registration, the user's Clickshare ID number and a sub-set of his usage preferences -- along with a set of "service class" type information -- is passed to Clickshare and stored there for that hour. NO personal information, and NO sensitive personal and financial EVER leaves the user's chosen Service Provider except when authorized by the user.

For the next hour, when this user visits any Clickshare site, Clickshare sends to that Content Provider the preference and service class information that the user allows to be released. Thus, any Content Provider in the Clickshare universe can serve the user according to his preferences, but DOES NOT know the user's sensitive personal information.

A record of all this user's usage is returned to Clickshare. This record is keyed by user ID number NOT by personal information or name. Thus, the portion of the Clickshare system that does the account settlement NEVER sees the personal information and never knows the name of the user involved.

So Big Brother is blind, if you want to think of it that way. The only association that Big Brother can make is (e.g.) that user ID 12345 has his home at Service Provider 567. Thus, the access statistics gathered by this settlement engine are purely "aggregated usage" statistics.

At the close of a session (end of an hour, or when the user "forcibly" logs out) Clickshare maintains only the following information about the session:

user-ID service-provider-ID session-id start-time 
end-time.

The take-home lesson here is that Clickshare keeps the user relationship "local" -- at one service provider. There _is_ a "big brother" -- the settlement engine -- but B.B. does not and cannot know the players.

Q: Can users prevent the "tracking" info from being collected and disseminated/sold?

A: If the user himself states that he will allow his Clickshare Service Provider to give out that demographic information then the Content Provider can correlate that user's usage exactly with his demographic profile. As with other media (and other credit relationships), we allow the user to opt out of this.

A user can opt to disallow his Service Provider from giving away his access information to third parties, but the information is collected and is transmitted among the set of Clickshare-enabled Content Providers. This is how settlement works -- there has to be accountability for each access. But, for all "internal" use, only the user-ID is transmitted around the system. DEMOGRAPHICS and CREDIT information is "local only". It is NOT part of the larger settlement system.

We envision a service provider or set of providers who will spring up to provide "guaranteed" private access using some sort of Swiss Bank technique. This this service will likely cost more, because it will not be subsidized by the sale of demographic data or advertising. But someone will provide it. The "hooks" are all there in the Clickshare(sm) Service structure to allow such anonymous use.