/.: Ian Goldberg Re: ZeroKnowledge to Discontinue Anonymity Service

R. A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Thu Oct 4 21:24:57 EDT 2001



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Re:Ian Goldberg, Bruce Schneier & Whitfield Di (Score:5, Informative)
by Ian Goldberg on Thursday October 04, @01:38PM (#2388977)
(User #526438 Info | http://slashdot.org/)
Believe me, no one is more disappointed about this than I am, but right now
there simply isn't enough market buy-in on the premium services to justify
the network's operating costs. :-(

As a business, we are focusing on the product that customers and partners
want. Here's an official Zero-Knowledge Systems statement on the matter:

With the release of Freedom 3.0 [zeroknowledge.com] and the discontinuation
of the Freedom Network (our anonymous browsing and encrypted pseudonym
service) there have been a number of questions for more details about the
decision to stop offering the Freedom Network services. Hopefully this will
help clarify things.

When we released Freedom 1.0 close to 2 years ago we saw a significant
percentage of our users subscribe to the premium Freedom Network services.
This was anticipated as our early adopters were very privacy and technology
aware and had expressed strong interest in the Freedom Network offering.

As we began to increase the distribution of Freedom into the mass market
with the release of Freedom 2.0 & 2.2, we saw a disproportionately high
percentage of users who subscribed to the standard features (and not
Freedom Network services). The initial interest in the premium (FN)
services amongst our early adopters simply didn't carry over to the
mainstream and as our user numbers grew, we began to realize that the
market was looking for the kind of features we are now offering in Freedom
3.0.

As we began our feature triage for Freedom 3.0 (almost 9 months ago) we
heard from customers and focus groups of users, as well as channel partners
[zeroknowledge.com], and reflected on the statistics from our existing user
base, and decided that there was not enough mass market demand for the
premium services to justify continuing the service.

This was entirely a market related decision. The market demand for consumer
Internet security and safety tools has grown considerably in the 4 years
our company has been in business. Freedom 3.0 is a strong competitor to
security offerings from companies such as Symantec and McAfee and we have
gotten very positive market support and a warm reception from channel
partners to this new version of our suite of privacy and security tools.

There has been speculation that this decision was somehow related to
government pressure or was made in the wake of the tragedies of September
11. This is simply untrue. For the past 3 months we have been beta-testing
this version with partners, getting certification from Microsoft for our
drivers and completing our Alpha and Beta cycles with our beta users.
Support for the Freedom network offering was removed from the client code
base well before the recent tragedies of September 11.

Our research team is continuing work in the area of privacy enhanced
network protocols, and we are open to any suggestions the research
community offers on how we can leverage the work that went into the Freedom
Network design and operation to advance this area of computer science. If
you have suggestions or interest in this, please contact us at
corporate at zeroknowledge.com [mailto].

Zero-Knowledge continues to offer our consumer protection utility Freedom
3.0 and we are very excited by the prospects for this product. We also have
a division that is addressing the market need of enterprise privacy
technologies that stem from managing consumer data that require strong
security and policy frameworks to adhere to privacy regulations and
customer preference management (Healthcare; Financial and other consumer
data that is subject to new security, privacy restrictions relating to
legislation like HIPAA, GLB, PIPEDA, EU privacy directive).

Our company continues to evolve and focus our efforts on market needs and
customer demands and we remain very confident of our prospects in these
markets.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Ian Goldberg, Bruce Schneier & Whitfield Di by Ian Goldberg (Score:5)
Moderation Totals: Informative=4, Underrated=1, Total=5.

* 2 replies beneath your current threshold.

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The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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