In Hong Kong, during the height of the SARS outbreak, there was a system that could tell you which buildings had had confirmed SARS cases. Now that's a reputation system.
It's easier to do this with products than with, say, people.
People are one thing, but objects -- all the books on my shelves, all the food in my kitchen, the artworks in the hallway -- we at Microsoft have bar-coded every one of them. Aurora is going to become a navigation tool. You can print a bar code for a penny and slap them on things. Which we do -- and then Facilities comes along and scrapes them off.
It seems that once Microsoft starts tracking the behaviour of individuals, you're asking for trouble. What about privacy?
I think it's a very important thing. And we have built NetScan to protect what I think are legitimate claims for privacy. Like a Net spider, NetScan takes publicly accessible documents off the Internet, and it respects metadata that says "leave me alone!" There is the robots.txt file that says, "You can look at this but not that." With Usenet there is one that says "leave my messages alone," and we respect that. We will not store your messages if you put that in them.
Couldn't a spammer just put that in his or her messages, so you wouldn't be able to identify them as a spammer?
That's a possibility, and that's something we would have to respect. But the system still would not fail, because a person with no reputation is a person who has a reputation. "Let me tell you about the people who the system has shown to have value." We're about letting the cream float the top and not about letting the other stuff sink.
How can you reassure someone who might be concerned that it's not such a good idea for computers to be keeping track of our belongings and our whereabouts?
I'm not sure, but we're leaking data all over the place now. And on the one hand, that has utility for other people. On the other, there's a privacy risk. In some ways, consider us a form of performance art. Would you like to see you? This is potent. We accept that and hope we can offer people good prophylactics against loss of privacy. And that may mean keeping multiple IDs and email addresses. Ultimately we may have to fragment our identities.
