BetaNews investigates Microsoft’s End to End Trust

Posted by Ken Y-N on April 15th, 2008 at 01:33pm

The “problem” with today’s internet users, as Scott Charney highlights in the “Establishing End-to-end Trust” white paper is that consumers want not just privacy, but also anonymity. Of course, the average user is relatively-easily identifiable from their IP address, but that’s a slightly different issue.

He writes:

“Ensuring that people can be identified raises the most complex social, political, and economic issues, with the No. 1 issue being privacy. The concern is twofold: (1) If authenticated identity is required to engage in Internet activity, anonymity and the benefits that anonymity provides, will be reduced; and (2) authenticated identifiers may be aggregated and analyzed, thus facilitating profiling.”

Trusted Computing has identification at its core, so how can anonymity be preserved by Trusted Computing? Microsoft’s seemingly contradictory claim is that secure identity ensures social anonymity.

There is also the PR problem in that Trusted or Trustworthy Computing plus Microsoft equal Big Brother in many people’s minds, with Trusted Computing earning a moniker like Digital Restriction Management, namely Treacherous Computing, used by many in the free software and open source communities.

Read the rest of this very thought-provoking article by Scott M. Fulton III at BetaNews.

Tags: microsoft