The quality of information available for free on the Internet is constrained by a lack of privacy. Your privacy is violated if you provide information that is then used in a way that you do not, or would not, approve. This is the case whether you are a person or an organization. A very common reaction that people have when a suspicious web site asks for their name is to make up a fictitious name. How many millions of “registered users” are in fact just made-up names? 

With organizations we have similarly deviant behavior. Organizations withhold content, including such apparently public service organizations as museums, precisely because they worry what unconstrained commercial uses others may make of that content. Wouldn’t it be nice if a company could put up information regarding possible defects in one of its products without fear that anyone going to that information would use it to support a lawsuit against the company or its officers and employees? 

From these observations, and many other similar ones, we conclude the Internet would be improved if privacy can be enhanced. The improvement would be the amount and quality of information available to more people.

We are working on a “privacy server protocol” to provide for automated bilateral negotiated privacy on the Internet, see http://yuan.ecom.cmu.edu/psp. This protocol has expression at the lowest levels of IP Internet communication and the power to prove that both parties agreed on a date certain to a fully negotiated contract regarding the use of the content provided.

The use of a contract, rather than a technical means, derives from Thomas Jefferson’s observation that in nature information is only owned, or possessed, as long it is not disclosed and held secret. It is the necessary role of government to protect the ownership of content that has been disclosed to even one other person. 

As Jefferson’s essential insight translated to all copyright and patent law: It is the role of congress “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”. By this essential insight we can know that only a contract or a law, such as copyright, that defines a default contract, can protect content once disclosed to any other party.  We argue in http://yuan.ecom.cmu.edu/symbiosis for technology and law to actively seek symbiotic partnership.

In a recent theoretical study of the combinatorics of the Internet, we asked the question about what kinds of privacy policies would permit everyone to visit everyone’s web site. A strong answer arose in the form of “persona”. You have the “persona” of being a browser on the Internet, being a shopper on the Internet, and, perhaps, being a stock trader on the Internet. Each of these persona imply that in a certain role there are accepted uses of information about you. We have since strongly backed the use of persona in the automated privacy protocol soon to be released (www.w3.org/p3p/appel ). Our combinatorics study in http://yuan.ecom.cmu.edu/pspnote  strongly suggests that such persona may well constitute the basis for a breakthrough in making higher quality content more available to more people.