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I- What can ePrio do for you ?
I-1 be a primary source to captivate your audience
These are heady times for those of you who cover the Information Revolution.
True, it seems as if the technology wave is tamer today than 30 years ago, when Internet was a toddler and personal computers pre-IBM-PCic. But far from being a spent force, the Information Age is now shaking the deepest values of our society. The debates about data privacy and data rights force us to reconsider the nature of ownership. The exploits of hackers expose the fragility of infrastructures. Big Business has become Big Brother, turning George Orwell's 1984 nightmare into reality barely 20 years past due.
Tracing its roots in both American ingenuity and European conscience, ePrio offers to be a primary source for you to relay to your audience, starting with real life examples of what is at stake.
For example, when informed in 1998 of what became ePrio's solution to confidentiality, the executive responsible for the online business of a large insurance company did not deny the power of such an approach nor the importance of confidentiality for his employer. He went on to explain what confidentiality meant for him:
- it is imperative that prospects and clients believe his company protects their private profile but this is a task for public relations. The company is not ready to bear undue technical costs to achieve such an objective.
- it is unthinkable that criteria used by the company be sent to execute on a computer outside of the company, e.g. to offer personalized quotes to car insurance prospects. Such company data is truly confidential and must receive the highest level of technical protection.
In stark language, privacy is not an academic subject, it is all about power and money. At issue is whether society wants to establish level playing fields for greater market efficiency or not, if it can be bought to preserve existing economic rents or not.
From the chance discovery ten years ago that client-server architecture could be enhanced to enable confidential interactions over networks to the belated realization that all existing economic powers were naturally set against it, ePrio has also slowly evolved original positions. You can for example:
Whether you report on the current debates from a detached perspective or advocate a specific point of view, you are welcome to benefit from ePrio's material.
I-2 provide tools to give voice to your audience
Influence which flows from the pen can be unrewarding. What if an issue proves intractable or held as such by the public ? How many words can be written before such a topic falls out of fashion , however paramount?
To help you sustain your audience interest, ePrio is not just a primary source of facts or opinions. ePrio brings you tools with which to give your audience a voice.
- For those of you who push for better privacy and fight undue influence from big business or big government, ePrio provides the power of the ballot box and campaign bullhorns. Start using tEC, the Electronic Confidant, and you gain the power to:
- invite your own readership to use tEC
- monitor the growth of your registration drive
- help it network with you and among itself.
In particular tEC Mail is ideal to tap confidential sources, free from the worry that third parties will read your mail at their own discretion.
- For those of you who enjoy both expertise and recognition, ePrio provides the opportunity to start your own tEC Domain by becoming a domain maker.
Such domains could complement existing search tools and information sources, by involving people more deeply, as experts, consultants, executives and harnessing non public information.
I-3 showcase your prophetic power
ePrio offers you a final type of opportunity, the opportunity of discovering ePrio. This is not a facetious remark. If you happen to believe ePrio has the potential to change the ways confidential data is traded over the Internet, you also understand that nobody knows about it, yet.
When you write about Google or Microsoft, you can expect the title of your article to catch your public's attention. But you realize that the fame of your target casts a shadow over your own, while your words compete on the subject with those of hundreds of opinion makers worldwide.
Not so with ePrio. While, at the apex of its fortune, Netscape hired so called evangelists to expound its positions, ePrio needs independent prophets to prepare the public to its solutions. You can expect little competition at this point and your fame will grow in proportion of your long-sightedness.
Take as an example the recent (April '06) Massachusetts bill sponsored by the chairman of the House Committeee on Consumer Protection. It includes a provision for what is called a credit report freeze, which allows consumers to stop release of their credit information to third parties. This is a laudable measure to mitigate identity fraud, a mounting issue.
As a prophet though, you may question the bias deeply embedded in the language. If each individual truly owned the rights to his or her own profile, no credit agency should be authorized to provide a report on this individual to a third party without this individual's express authorization. A freeze implies a temporary, exceptional action rather than what should be the ordinary, default case.
Imagine the howls from the credit reporting industry that such an impertinent view would crippled commerce and ruined the economy. Yet in ePrio's perspective, a level playing field is quite practical. And by reaping new market efficiencies, it would actually speed up commerce and better the economy.
Using the so called recommendation feature of ePrio's solution, relevant domain makers can give:
- "sellers" the power to ask "buyers" for a favorable credit report from agencies they, the "sellers", trust
- "buyers" the power to ask credit report agencies for a recommendation, which could be graded as if for a bond issue,
- credit report agencies the power to issue a recommendation based on their independent analysis:
- to the "buyer"
- for transmission to the "seller" at the "buyer"'s discretion
- upon reception from the "buyer", verifiable by the "seller" at the "recommender"'s site
This solution implements the unique added-value created by independent credit analysis. At the same time it eliminates the economic rent to credit report agencies represented by unlimited sales of credit reports to third parties, an infringement of individuals' rights to their own reputation.
II- What can you do for ePrio ?
II-1 report
No explanations needed. Reporting to your audience about its existence and its solution to practical problems provides ePrio with free marketing.
While you may use tEC, the Electronic Confidant, as a bullhorn to your advantage, your influence on public opinion can act as a bullhorn for ePrio.
II-2 explain
While your reporting is precious to ePrio, it pales in comparison to what you can achieve by explaining how ePrio's technology works.
Whatever explanation ePrio can give about its own work is doomed to appear both selfserving and obscure. Obscure, for the inventor is like a foreigner who speaks his strange tongue slowly and loudly in a well-meaning but ineffectual effort to be understood. Selfserving, because marketing documentation is inherently a list of claims rather than facts.
Yet very few ordinary readers or users of tEC, the Electronic Confidant, have all the resources to investigate ePrio's claims. It is you who uniquely enjoys the experience, the time and the support network necessary for the task. The public relies on your having access to these, coupled to your professional skills for translating technical concepts into everyday language. ePrio offers you three sources:
- the data provided by this site
- the knowledge you gain from using tEC, the Electronic Confidant, and the associated services
- its patents, US Patent Number 6,092,197 and US Patent Applications 2006/0053279 and 2009/0076914, available at the US Patent and Trademark Office
Based on ePrio's experience, its technology is grounded on four concepts, each running counter to general practice.
- II-2-a continuity of the security fence:
ePrio uses standard security components,
It is an understatement to say that the general public hardly grasps how security really works. Two notions in particular are totally obfuscated.
- security is determined by the weakest link in the chain. In view of this simple notion, the prevalence of sites which insist on using cookies, i.e. who demand the right to access the file system on their users's machine for themselves and, via the browser options, for all others, is frightening.
- trust requires a third party and third party backed trust is a guarantee, rather than a risk. When presented with a developper's certificate, users receive a stern security warning as to whether they trust the signer. This would be unobjectionable if:
- a similar warning appeared each time a user receives data susceptible to contain a virus, e.g. every email
- the message also stressed that a developper's certificate guarantees via an independent, well known third party:
- the origin of the code
- the integrity of the code transmission
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- II-2-b confidentiality:
This is the most subtle notion to explain. Confidentiality is of necessity based on trust, promptly turned by organizations into a PR exercise aggravated by lawyer oversight. As a result it is highly doubtful any user bothers reading, let alone believing today's proliferation of privacy policies.
Against this background, you must convey how ePrio's solution differs as it substitutes trust in a company with trust in an auditable mechanism.
Trust in a company must always be qualified by the unforeseeable actions of :
- employee's mistakes due to lack of proper training, random human errors or sophisticated "social engineering" (aka confidence games)
- illegal behavior of rogue employees, at any level in the hierarchy, from office cleaners to CEO's
- demands by lawyers working for a civil or criminal suit or by government agents invoking the power of the State
Trust in an auditable mechanism relies solely on objective factors: the nature of the mechanism and ultimately its security protection.
ePrio reduces confidentiality management to technical security. This puts the human factor inherent to confidentiality back where it belongs: its users, fully and solely responsible for their passwords, their profile declarations and the filters they use to convey their wishes for match making.
ePrio's confidentiality mechanism, tEC, the Electronic Confidant, is better studied via the patents covering it but here are some key aspects:
- tEC is included into a downloadable code whose control escapes ePrio by design and whose integrity is guaranteed by its developper's certificate
- unknown remote correspondents may ask this local code to carry out interactions with the local user on their behalf, either via a tEC-approved application, or a tEC-approved service template
- no profile information needs be communicated to anyone to perform match making. It stays on the user's machine protected by a password which the user can set and is not recorded anywhere
- all communications by this code to the outside world are encrypted and subject to user's supervision, by either before the fact authorization (personal information), or after the fact verification (system messages)
All other solutions requires a user to entrust his or her profile information to someone else before it can be accessed to deliver potential benefits to the user. tEC allows a user to ascertain the existence of actual benefits before he or she may decide to trust relevant profile information to the correspondent offering those benefits.
It must be acknowledged here that ePrio has not had the resources to have its code audited and signed by an independent third party. However ePrio is committed to take that final step as soon as these resources materialize.
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- II-2-c domain making:
ePrio's technology is a solution to the current want of confidentiality on Internet. It is not an end-user solution though, the limited offering of generic tEC Mail excepted.
From an end-user perspective, tEC, the Electronic Confidant, is a platform upon which domain makers can build matching services in their domains of expertise. This three tier approach is nothing new. eBay's merchants and Wikipedia's contributors play roles similar to the one of ePrio's domain makers. It warrants further examination though.
This intermediary tier adds value both relative to
- end users: they formalize expert knowledge as they organise matching places and matching fairs and pre-define wish templates, for ease of use
- ePrio: they master the rich set of raw matching features offered by tEC as they decide what to use and what to ignore
The capacity of the middle tier to be protected from the rapacity of the platform tier is key. Microsoft is known to take away added-value features from independent developpers to embed into its next Windows version. Via its auction system, Google makes advertisers compete as to whom will give it the most of the added-value to be gained from online marketing. eBay's merchants are known to be dissatisfied by ever higher fees.
ePrio claims to maintain a better balance between its own interest and those of its domain makers, a direct consequence of the long term complementarity of the relationship.
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- II-2-d recommendations:
Last but not least is ePrio's mechanism for recommendation. As a match engine, ePrio realizes that recommendations are one of the key advantage of the competition: human networking, characterized by:
- true confidentiality, unlike the so-called social networks which collects user profiles under self-proclaimed privacy policies
- true accountability, unlike the so-called feedback mechanisms which let a more or less manipulated crowd decide for you
Whenever deemed useful, an ePrio domain maker can incorporate confidential, personal, verifiable recommendations into the corresponding wish lists of the end users. The mechanism, illustrated apropos credit reporting, applies for all domains, recruitment being a prime case.
II-3 recommend
The previous roles in which you may help ePrio are entirely objective: report the facts and explain how it works.
The third role is entirely subjective. As an opinion maker, you have the power to cast an independent and influential judgement on ePrio's claims.
Your recommendation will be appreciated.
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