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Cyber Dialogue recommended that Web sites only collect information that is absolutely necessary and “treat it with respect.”

While published privacy policies are commonly used to inform users of the company’s practice and gain their trust, the reality is that these policies are often inconspicuously placed on the site, full of legal jargon and difficult to understand.

The long-term gain of retaining high-value customers clearly outweighs short-term gain of selling them out. Building a two-way dialogue is what this medium is all about.

Privacy protection is an issue that is not top-of-mind among consumers, but as soon as it is violated, the latent-sleeping giant awakes. Web sites should assure its customers that they are proactively on guard to protect their customers? right to privacy. Companies should never compromise this commitment for short-lived benefits.

Informed consent of the customers is vital to the use of e-data.

Pay-to-Surf Companies

Software programs circulating on the Internet are secretly using anonymous web browsers and other anonymizing services to defraud companies that pay Web users to surf the Internet.

Often called ?pay-to-sleep? programs, such software has been circulated on popular Internet bulletin boards and chat rooms. The programs simulate web surfing on a computer while the user is away, generating funds from a pay-to-surf service. These programs rely on many anonymous web browsers to ?launder? their web surfing. This slows the surfing for others using anonymous services, compelling the operators to pay for faster and more expensive Internet connections to the Web servers that run their site.

Defrauding pay-to-surf companies has become the latest scam in cyberspace. In the world of electronic commerce such a scenario is the cyber equivalent of discovering the local drug dealer has commandeered your store?s pay phone, or learning that your accountant is laundering funds through your business.

It also places the operators of anonymous sites in an ethical quandary: If your site is designed for anyone to use for any anonymous purpose, do you have a right to complain if someone is using it for a purpose that you find objectionable?

?We have to, on the one hand, say ?We don?t care what you do,? and on the other hand say ?We may not care what you do, but if you are doing something that we know of, that is circumventing the controls on our browser, you will be banned?,? said Steven Watsky, president of the Prague-based Websperts.net computer consulting company. ?We are in the unique position of not having to have records, yet we have to keep a certain record, a 404 log, so that our bandwidth does not get eaten up,? he added.

Watsky hopes to turn his ?Clandestination? anonymous browser into a ?Swiss bank on the Internet,? a subpoena-proof, untraceable site that will keep no records whatsoever of what users do with the browser. Now soliciting venture capital, Watsky plans to relocate his server to a foreign country?that he declined to name?that is exempt from international laws requiring him to comply with subpoenas for user records.

But six weeks ago, after changing the file name of his anonymous browser, Watsky discovered that a few IP addresses were hitting his site thousands of times looking for the old file name.

?If we see a great number of files not found, you are doing one of two things: You are either using an outdated address for our browser, or you are doing something on our site that you should not be doing,? Watsky said.

Meanwhile, however, Watsky said the fraudulent software programs are clogging his browser and placing a drag on his server with tens of thousands of erroneous hits. After a single IP address logged 500 404s, he did some research. He tracked the user to an address on a free Web hosting service, and was surprised at what he found.

The software program in use, called MoveThis!, was tied into virtually every anonymous service in the world, Watsky said. ?He had a foolproof way of you being able to score points and the pay-to-surf services would not know that you had lied about the number of points or that you had loaded up the points yourself,? he said.

Privacy Times found copies of MoveThis! and similar programs on the betanews.com Website, a reputable site that posts pre-release versions of commercial software, shareware, and freeware programs. Other programs on betanews included allMouse and Fake Surf, all touted as programs designed to simulate Web surfing.

Watsky said that for the past six weeks he has been playing a cat and mouse game with users of the software. The only way he was able to shut off the offending users was to go directly to the pay-to-surf companies with the account numbers of the perpetrators.

Guerrilla War on Nosy Sites

Dot coms have been caught snooping all summer?and a new privacy survey of over 1,000 Internet surfers shows they are striking back. The dispute du jour involves Pharmatrak. Privacy advocates accused the Boston technology firm of secretly tracking the Web habits of those who visit the sites of eleven pharmaceutical giants, including Pfizer, Pharmacia, and SmithKline Beecham. By using tiny computer data tags called ?cookies,” Pharmatrak records the browsing habits of users wanting to know more about various medical conditions such as herpes, allergies, and drug addiction.

While Pharmatrak officials say they track users anonymously, the company’s Web site states that in the future it may personally identify visitors.

Deception apparently begets deception. A study

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