SciAm, March, 1996
"Privacy and Data Collection on the Net."
There are still a few eccentric souls who gamely try to
hold on to what lingering shreds of anonymity they
possess. They never fill out questionnaires; they give
their Social Security numbers only to their bank and to
their broker. They encrypt their e-mail; they bypass the
supermarket discount card that links identity to
purchases; they pay cash for medical procedures they do
not want known; and they wait patiently for e-cash to
become a reality. Joining these hardy individualists are
privacy advocates such as EPIC and Net groups like
cypherpunks which believe in untraceable communications
and in the technology needed to achieve it.
CPU_nks