During the launch of its dead-on-arrival Jini technology, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy infamously barked “you have zero privacy anyway—get over it” in response to a question about the new technology’s privacy safeguards.
Fast-forward seven years and McNealy is backstroking pretty hard, apparently having discovered a market for privacy after all. “It’s going to get scarier if we don’t come up with technology and rules to protect appropriately privacy and secure the data, and the most important asset we have is obviously the data on people—our customers and employees and partners,” McNealy said during his keynote at the RSA Conference. “And if we can’t protect that, people are not going to go online.” Hyperbolic maybe, but better late to the privacy party than never.
The reason for McNealy’s turnabout? A week before the conference, one of Sun’s partners lost a laptop containing McNealy’s personal information.
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