It's worth noting how Fred Wilson is in a very precarious position to be
advocating privacy since he is invested in many companies that profit
from invading privacy. It's great to see him advocating improvements to
privacy even though <i>ensuring</i> privacy by technical means is undoubtedly
against his personal best interests.<p>It is entirely feasible to build a web browser which ensures privacy,
but it would come at a steep cost. If you disable the "REFERER" [SIC]
sent by the browser, a lot of sites break. If you disable the
"USER_AGENT" sent by the browser, a lot of sites break. If you disable
"COOKIES" in the browser, a lot of sites break. If you disable "FLASH"
in the browser, a lot of sites break. If you disable "JAVASCRIPT" in the
browser, a lot of sites break. If you require PROXIES or Onion Routing,
a lot of sites break.<p>With mobile devices, disabling GPS/Signal location, network access,
address book, and many other features will break a lot of
sites/apps/services.<p>I'm sure you can see the pattern.<p>The tough question is, would you use a browser/system that intentionally
broke most of the web/Internet to ensure your privacy?<p>Do you want to be the person fielding support calls from your mom when
some company on the `net insists on having privacy invading misfeatures
enabled?<p>The most "ambitious startup" might be in trying to fix the privacy
and security problems of the existing Internet by refusing to support
the regularly misused misfeatures, but the resulting loss of
functionality and compatibility might be too much to bear.<p>> We should be careful not to undercut the economic underpinning of the Internet in our attempts to regulate online privacy.<p>Whether regulated by new laws or prevented by technical means, you would
not eradicate the economic underpinnings, instead, the underpinnings
would simply change. For example, people would still pay Google to
display advertising along with search results even if it was impossible
to do user-identifiable profiling. The untargeted advertising might be
less effective than targeted advertising, but it would still be far more
effective than no advertising at all.
Historically, privacy bills that get passed tend to be anti-privacy bills. The Medical Privacy Act gave your doctor permission to sell all your private medical data to marketers. The change is I now am forced to sign a privacy release that states I accept that they will sell my private data, and if I refuse to sign it, they refuse to provide medical services.<p>Any new bill about internet privacy in the US will be the same way. Lobbyists will make sure the name is orwellian doublespeak. It's not a coincidence that we see anti-privacy people like Wilson advocating for what will soon be a bill their people have carefully constructed in order to give them free reign to do as they please.