The Secret Service - Server - SafeWeb.com masks Internet identity

Brandweek, Jan 1, 2001 by Jennifer Tanaka

Hsu believes there's plenty of latent demand for his company's technology. "Think about all the people who work at your company and then think about the most paranoid 1 to 3 percent," says Hsu. "Multiply that by Europe and the rest of the world. That's a huge number." Hsu's back-of-the-envelope calculations make sense considering that people are increasingly doing personal Web surfing at work, where they have access to high-speed connections. The threat, Hsu says, isn't limited to the errant hacker. More likely, it's your own company's IT department that is scanning employee Net activity for illicit behavior, whether it's accessing pornography or sending out resumes via e-mail. In addition to known threats, Hsu points out that new privacy risks pop up every day. He cites so-called "Web bugs" as the latest encroachment by interactive advertising agencies, and they are already under fire from privacy watchdogs for online profiling. Web bugs are a particularly nefarious new pest. A bit of software code can be e mbedded within an Internet banner ad. When the banner ad appears, it activates an image file 1 pixel by 1 pixel in dimension, so tiny that it can't be detected by the human eye. As long as the window stays open, it functions like a keyhole, allowing whoever programmed the Web bug to watch and record any browsing that takes place on that machine. "Our service blocks that," says Hsu. SafeWeb also lets users selectively block the setting of cookies.

But more pressing, claims Hsu, is the need for this type of software in countries such as China and Saudi Arabia, where the governments control, and sometimes own and operate, all the ISPs. Hsu, who is Chinese-American, says the software is really designed to help these citizens. The Saudi government began to block the SafeWeb site just before Thanksgiving. "We were getting 70,000 page views a day from Saudi Arabia when that happened," claims Hsu. "We've gotten tons of e-mail thanking us for the service but now nobody there can use SafeWeb." Hsu says his company is now testing an upcoming version of the SafeWeb system that will allow users to route around blocked access and he expects that it could be available as early as the end of this month. When that happens, Hsu vows that he will, in effect, give countries like China a free press. "Some guy in Beijing could post content on Geocities in the form of an online magazine, and then anyone in China could read it without the government knowing," Hsu says.

In the United States, the FBI had its image ruffled when the public learned in July that the agency was using a machine, menacingly named Carnivore, to gather Internet usage data from ISPs. Carnivore plugs into an ISP's server and gathers the trickle of data that accumulates as a specific user logs in and out of his or her ISP. Privacy watchdog groups--including the ACLU and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)--raised the concern that the FBI, using Carnivore, could collect data on people not suspected of crimes while it was in the process of monitoring the traffic of targeted individuals.