At Sun Microsystems' summit on Emerging Countries (BRICA=Brasil, Russia, India, China, Africa) today, the company's Chief Privacy Officer, Michelle Dennedy admitted that although "the industry has failed in protecting the log-in process", *real* user privacy is achievable. However, for Dennedy, secrecy must not be made possible nor be desirable, to prevent the bad guys doing "bad things"!
Sun's CPO also points out that while collecting data was at its paroxysm during the Bubble days, companies "did not know what to do with all that data" while causing "risks for the users and their enterprises".

"If we start to be really considering information about human beings as valuable as a stack of cash, we will start to be a lot more intelligent on how/what we collect and how long and where we keep it. And I think that it will depress the endless appetite for some of the processing that we are doing now", Dennedy said.

Moreover, for Sun's CPO, collecting less data has another unexpected consequence: it's good for the environment as companies will use less of their CPU cycles to process unnecessary data. Although a bit simplistic to me, the message sure sounds well in this "eco-friendly"/Prius-loving/green everything frenzy/bubble environment.