Considering this reluctance and to stop the possible drain of revenue, Privacy partnership, a group of leading developers and supervised by TRUSTe have designed a campaigne to promote the guidelines regarding online security. The campaign already has gained support from giants like Microsoft, AOL, Excite Inc., Lycos, Netscape. Officials from Microsoft terms it as a "grass-roots campaign" to increase consumer awareness about the strategic importance of online privacy, and have urged others to join the community as well.
In 2001 Microsoft was accused of engaging into unfair and deceiving practices by dozens of customer privacy groups and asked the FTC to ban the release of the than new windows XP because it used .Net technology which was incorporated in the unique feature of XP's Passport authentication system, which allowed user to log in once and stores their id and password in its database. This facilited users to avoid repeatedly enter their ids and passwords also it had the hailstorm and electronic wallets services, which collected crucial information like credit card details which was released at the users discretion.
In answer to this microsoft made some changes in the technology and made it more secure by creating logs for consumers and included affirmative consent of users and explicit opt-in to release any private and crucial information which made the system more stronger.
The US (FTC) believes that the absence of mandatory privacy regulations has barred e-commerce from using its potential. couple of surveys have suggested that privacy concerns led to losses in sales of US$ 2.9 billion in 1999, and up to US$ 18 billion in 2002. The FTC has constantly been trying to know whether online privacy issues can best be left with companies to self-monitor, or whether the federal government should intervene.
Reference- BBC, Microsoft,
