After meeting with Intel Corp executives for two hours on Thursday January 28, organizers of a boycott against the microprocessor giant decided that the patch Intel published on Monday did not resolve their concerns over the processor serial number (PSN) to be included in the Pentium III. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), JunkBusters and Privacy International pulled the boycott together just four hours after Intel announced the PSN on Wednesday January 20 (CI No 3,582). Intel says the number will be used to identify individual users in e-commerce and other net-based transaction applications. That’s exactly what privacy advocates are afraid of. They don’t want to see the PSN becoming the net equivalent of a social security number, a kind of supercookie, a unique identifier which can be collected by many sites, indexed, accumlated in databases and analyzed for patterns and trends. The records of many different companies could be joined without the user’s knowledge or consent to provide an intrusive profile of activity on the computer, the boycott organizers warned. Without strong legal protection for privacy and given the economic incentives to abuse it: widespread abuse seems more than likely, they concluded. Besides being characterized as misconceived and poorly patched, Intel’s PSN is insecure, its critics allege. Because Intel didn’t bother creating a secure way to query the ID, it will be easy to break the security, observed cryptographer Bruce Schneier. EPIC, JunkBusters and Privacy International say they won’t call off the boycott until Intel announces that it will disable the feature in the Pentium III and other chips that it plans to ship. They believe they have no choice: We see no other plausible means of stopping the irreparable harm to internet privacy that would be caused by Intel’s inclusion of a PSN in its next major chip.
