"You should adopt a pro-privacy policy and put it front and center," Anderson said. "Take the lead in privacy debates. Act as though your brand depends on it, because it does."
In response to this "problem," the e-commerce industry manufactured what it manufactures best: buzz, this time surrounding a new class of information middlemen -- "Trusted Agents" is the buzzword title -- who would presumably protect consumers from information theft. Instead of buying directly from vendors, consumers would make purchases through a middleman, set up specifically so that e-commerce sites couldn't collect personal information from their customers. But who these middlemen would be, how they would go about their business, or whether they will ever even exist is anybody's guess, panelists acknowledged. It's even questionable whether the industry actually desires such a scheme, they said.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the Seybold conference.
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Industry executives "like the idea of associating themselves with credibility," Caruso said, "without going through the trouble of being credible."
In the end, the ethical debates will subside, of course.
E-tailers will continue pilfering so much personal information from us that they will be able to offer us biscuits by cell phone, just as we're sitting down for tea. And they'll get rich.
Music producers, book publishers, and every other sort of intellectual property seller will face down piracy in the same way producers throughout the ages have reacted when new reproduction and distribution technology has altered the economics of consumption -- they will lower their prices. Record companies, book companies, and other companies making goods of the mind will offer their wares at around a dime a hit, paid with special, Internet-bit chump change. And they'll remain rich.
And the rest of us, well, by then we'll hardly care. We'll be wearing special devices that will allow our minds to perceive computer-generated images through electrodes directly connected to the neurons in our brains -- a technological possibility repeated with eerie fondness by several speakers at Seybold.
Most of the time we'll use our real eyes, though this may not make much difference, given that surfaces everywhere will be covered with digital paper now being developed at Xerox Parc research center, and pockmarked with tiny computers that understand our every whim.
At other times we'll switch into our Web-linked brain-screen mode, and have the digital equivalent of a dream. Someone will mysteriously know that we wish to click on to a Gnutella-lifted digital nature walk, and he will simultaneously debit our accounts by 7.2 cents. We'll close our eyes and experience a Web-delivered future, where every valley has been exalted and every mountain has been made low. The rough places will be made plain, the crooked places will be made straight, and, through the glory of the Internet, all flesh shall see it together.
