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Privacy advocates are waking up, and they don't like the smell. Last week the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission charging that Passport collects personal information deceptively. The advocates' nightmare vision is that Microsoft will use Passport to collect piles of data on Internet users, including what sites they visit, what they buy, whom they send gifts to and where they travel...
Passport has Microsoft's competitors worried that Gates & Co. want to use it to collect a fee on virtually every online consumer transaction. AOL has charged that Passport is Microsoft's attempt to gain a "choke point" on e-commerce...
...Microsoft insists that the complaints about Passport are overblown. The only information it collects from Starbucks buyers, it says, are e-mail address, city and state, and it promises not to turn that data over to third parties. Microsoft insists it never asked Starbucks.com to make it an exclusive payment option. "It's totally at the discretion of the participants to decide what makes most sense for their business," says Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn...
...While the locals fight it out, multinationals?with the exception of Microsoft?remain warily on the sidelines, unsure if they can profit in China's savage market. Today, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard have a combined market share of under 3%; Palm and IBM don't even sell PDAs on the mainland and there isn't enough Mandarin software to spur consumer interest. "We know this is a weakness," concedes Franklin Sze, product director for Compaq's iPAQ in Greater China. Preoccupied with tough times at home and hobbled by supply problems, U.S. PDA manufacturers have focused international efforts instead...
...hindered by a lack of common software standards. Each PDA maker has gone its own way, creating homegrown?and incompatible?programs for each device. There is little incentive for the independent software developers that have helped come up with 10,000 applications for Palm and more than 650 for Microsoft's Windows...