If you are in the business of selling products relating to online privacy, now might be a good time to step up your Internet marketing promotions. In last month’s issue of CNET Downloads Publishers Newsletter, it was stated … “the online privacy category saw an astonishing 924 percent increase in download activity between August (2002) and February (2003).”
Downloads from CNET included: spyware, pop-up ad blockers, cookie deleters, anonymizers, spam washers, and a variety of other online privacy tools.
Privacy products are becoming popular for a good reason. Internet users do not want their online activities monitored or invaded.
Privacy has always been a priority for most citizens. This new surge of interest in online privacy products demonstrates a demand by the general public to have their online activities kept confidential.
These are some of the products or services that are currently being marketed to fill online privacy needs:
Online privacy software products will do a variety of tasks. For example:
1. Stop network monitoring by an employer or ISP.
2. Set up a shield between the user and advertisers, hackers, and online snoops.
3. Remove hidden threats from sites that are visited.
4. Decrease the risk of leaking out confidential information, such as credit card data.
5. Block cookies and Web bugs from being stored on a hard-drive.
6. Stop pop-up and banner ads from being displayed on the screen.
7. Prevent unauthorized viewing of email.
8. Filter out and delete SPAM from incoming email.
9. Prevent specified websites from being viewed on the screen.
Whenever there is a significant trend in a business area, there is also opportunities for financial reward. Many new businesses are created from a need that suddenly arises in the marketplace. From the above statistics, it would appear that products and services relating to online privacy may become hot-sellers.
What can you do to help online privacy become more effective? You might come up with a profitable idea, as well as offer a worthwhile product or service to Internet users in their quest for online privacy, trust, and confidentiality.
ONLINE PRIVACY RESOURCES
Become a member of the BBBOnline Program and put a Reliability seal on your website.
http://www.bbbonline.org
Join the Truste Seal Program
http://www.truste.org
Download Anonymizer Private Surfing. This software makes your online activities impossible to track and filters out annoying clutter like pop-ups, cookies, Web bugs, and malicious code. http://www.anonymizer.com
Try Spytech Online “award-winning” privacy software.
http://www.spytech-web.com
McAfee Security sells products for all types of PC and Internet security needs.
http://www.mcafee.com
To read a good example of a privacy policy, visit Fedex.com.
http://www.fedex.com/us/privacypolicy.html
To preview the latest software products relating to online privacy, at CNET, do the following:
1. Go to http://download.com.
2. In the Search box enter the keywords “online privacy”.
3. Click Go. There will be listings for over 100 privacy products.
Education is one of the secrets for getting more informed about online privacy. Read either of these guides for detailed information.
ConsumerPrivacyGuide
http://www.consumerprivacyguide.org
Online Guide to Practical Privacy Tools
http://www.epic.org/privacy/tools.html
Mary Howard is the author of the PDF ebook “How to get your Business into Ship-shape”. Get a list of her How-to Ebooks. Send a blank email to:
ebooks@humming-enterprises.com Visit her website at: http://humming-enterprises.com
