Mosquitoes, burglars and peeping toms
Should I be getting paranoid about a frogans wiring my desktop to the Internet? In my last entry I talked about how a frogans can become a permanent window from your desktop to the Net, and how this can be a means by which Internet publishers can strengthen their ties with end-users. Is this not just another way for Big Brother to infringe on our privacy?
I’ve been talking about a frogans as a permanent desktop browsing tool, but I think I need to expand a little bit about what is meant by “browsing”.
Perhaps the moniker “browser” is misleading. Back in the old days when browsing applied only to physical activities that you do in bookstores, record stores, libraries, and mail-order catalogues, you never had to consider the idea that an invisible entity was browsing back at you. Okay, there’s the occasional clerk eyeing the customers, watching to see if that Hot Tuna LP is going to move, or if that kid’s paid for everything that’s in his backpack. But at least that clerk was a person with whom you could make eye contact.
Today it’s a different scene. Instead of walking in into a building, or a room, to feed our eyes, ears, stomachs and brains, we exchange digits through an enticing mysterious black box. The vast majority know little of how the thing works by itself, and even less of how it interacts with that maze of bigger boxes on the other end of the line. Yet we light the thing up, make it an integral part of our lives, fill it up with all sorts of personal, professional and financial information, and then go and use it to browse through other black boxes that are not fundamentally different from our own.
Talk about blind trust. It sounds like leaving your entire wallet at the door as a right of passage.
Alright, not completely so. That’s because the perceived risk of becoming a victim of fraud or the invasion of privacy has been, up until now, acceptable to most people. But who’s to say if the perception, or reality, of these risks will be kept in check? And for how long?
Can you trust that frogans, that window-less window, wide-open day and night – can you trust it to keep the mosquitos, burglers and peeping toms at bay and out of your hair? The reality is that trust can never be imposed. It can only be earned. The ultimate profusion of Frogans technology will depend on its reputation for assuring the end-user’s security and privacy.
One-way window, mirrored sunglasses, and all that
Frogans technology implements security measures that, until now, have been unheard of in Internet navigation.
While a frogans is the navigational interface that you see on your screen, it is the Frogans Player that displays it and manages its connection to the Internet. Unlike a desktop widget, for example, a frogans is not an application, but rather an interactive rendering of images and content written in FSDL that the Frogans Player has located on the Internet and displays on your screen. Frogans Technology architecture assures that it is only the Frogans Player that will ever be capable of doing this, guaranteeing that a frogans, regardless of its author, will always carry with it the privacy and security measures provided by the Frogans Player.
For instance:
- The Frogans Player will never allow any content from a frogans to be written to the end-user’s hard drive. This is a huge step away from the conventions accepted for web browsers. Frogans content is loaded only into active memory, protecting the end-user from any possible corrupted or malicious content (should it get past the parsing process, which is highly improbable).
- The Frogans Player will never transmit information concerning the end-user, be it their operating system, system fonts, applications installed, or other content. The Frogans Player may transmit session information concerning a frogans to a server, but this information is temporary and completely anonymous with respect to the end-user.
All that is to say that a frogans, if it is intended to be a window overlooking the Internet, is a one-way window. It’s part of the deal. If there are any other Internet technologies out there that can assure the same level of consideration the end-user, I hope that someone will say so by hitting me with some comments.