Hello, I must be going - Red Herring Catch of the Day, 8/18/1999

Last Wednesday in Palo Alto I ran into Austin Hill, president of Zero Knowledge Systems. He invited me to join him at a coffee shop to meet with some potential business partners. There I saw Austin talking a great game: his company's mission is to make it possible for people to surf anonymously, to leave no tracks that could somehow complicate their lives. Do you really want your insurance company to know that you hang out in an AA chat room, for example?

Will after-hours trading leave consumers in the dark?   VC P.S.: LA story   Toys 'R' Us leaves VC playground

And speaking of secrecy, last Thursday morning I met with the team from Disappearing Inc. (these are the paranoid guys I wrote about yesterday). They offer secret email that features "universal deletion" of messages after a user-specified period of time, so your messages can't come back to haunt you (Oliver North might have found this useful). Basically, Disappearing.com owns one of the security keys required to read a message, but they "lose the keys" when you want them to. The product works inside existing corporate email applications like Outlook. The solution isn't perfect, but it does prevent people from recreating email logs from backup tapes. Disappearing.com will make money from corporate site licenses.

- Rafe Needleman
Editor, Redherring.com

FURTHER READING
  Company site: Disappearing Inc.
  The ZKS pitch: "We know nothing"
  Privacy fears redefine "Intel Inside"


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