was planning my vacation to Silicon Valley - where every billboard along the highway advertises another dot-com company - and I thought it might be fun to have dinner with my old friend David. So I called him up, and we set a time and place.
A few hours later I discovered I had e-mail from David - or rather, from David's calendar. It was a bright blue-and-white invitation, telling me that my appointment with David had been confirmed. Near the top was a little button with the words ''add to my calendar.'' And at the bottom was an advertisement for Yahoo Calendar: ''Do You Yahoo?''
Yahoo Calendar is a free Web-based scheduling system. It's designed to replace both those old-style paper-and-ink appointment books and calendar programs such as Microsoft's Outlook Express that run on PCs. To view your calendar, you just point your browser at http://calendar.
yahoo.com/ and type in your Yahoo username and password. (If you don't have an account, Yahoo will create one for you.)
Once you are there, you can type in your appointments and meetings. Once you have set it up, you can view your daily, weekly, or monthly calendar just like a day timer. Yahoo can automatically send you e-mail before your appointments. And, as I discovered, it can notify your friends of an impending rendezvous.
Besides its calendar, Yahoo also has a Web-based address book. In fact, the two work together: It's easy to schedule an appointment with somebody in your address book. And both of these services operate with Yahoo Mail, the company's Web-based e-mail system.
Yahoo Calendar is just one of several Web-based personal information services springing up on the Internet. Another one is Any
Day.com. Within a few months you're likely to find calendar and address book services at your favorite Internet portal, including Excite, AltaVista, and others. Best of all, they are all free, paid for by advertising.
The big advantage of these Web-based services is that they are everywhere the Web is. No matter where you are, if you can access the Net, you can see your calendar. If you don't live the tethered life, you can print out your calendar and carry it with you. And most of them can synchronize with palm-top organizers such as the 3Com Palm Pilot and machines based on Microsoft's Windows CE.
However, since these services store all of your personal information somewhere else that can be a potential problem as well. You don't control your data: The calendar provider does. And these companies can do whatever they want with your information.
Currently, few on-line calendar companies are doing much to mine the personal information stored on their computers. When you register for Yahoo Calendar, the company asks for your real name, your age, sex, marital status, occupation, and interests. Yahoo runs fancy statistics on this information and gives the summary results to advertisers - the people who are picking up the bill.
Right now advertisers might be satisfied knowing some percentage of Yahoo's users are unmarried geeks in their 30s. But who knows what will happen in the future. Someday you might schedule dinner at Bob's Pizza and, a few minutes later, get a coupon suggesting you change your plans and eat at Joe's.
Of course, Yahoo and the other calendar companies all have privacy policies that promise to keep your personal information private - well, more or less. If you actually read these policies you'll find they are filled with wishy-washy words and, in any case, are subject to change at any time. No law protects your personal information stored on these services. And, to date, on-line companies have a pretty poor record when it comes to protecting private information - especially in the face of a lawsuit.
Earlier this year, for example, Yahoo was sued by Raytheon, which wanted the names of people who had been participating in a Yahoo chat group. Yahoo caved in and coughed up the names, after which the suit was dropped. There is a lesson here: When you store your information on another company's computers, you are trusting that company's legal department to defend your privacy. The problem for Web users is that Yahoo's legal department works for Yahoo, not for you.
Put your data into Yahoo Calendar and you are also trusting the company will weed out any rogue employees who might violate the company's privacy policy and sell your information. And the threat of rogue employees is very real. Over the past decade the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and even MCI have had problems with employees selling personal information. It is unreasonable to assume that companies such as Yahoo and AnyDay will be free from similar incidents.
Another problem is encryption, or rather, the lack thereof. None of these on-line services uses encryption to scramble the data sent over the Internet. This means your password can easily be sniffed by a hacker, who might then go into your calendar and change your information.
Overall, I suspect more and more people will minimize the potential for abuse and start keeping their calendar on the Web. I would like to use these services myself. Sadly, I'm just not that trusting.
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.
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