Imagining the Internet

A vision for the future

This is one of nearly a thousand foresight statements shared by people from around the world. To return to the Voices of the People home page, click here. To do a refined search of the Voices of the People statements, click here. To submit your ideas to this online archive, look to the upper right corner of this page, click on "Share Your Prediction" and fill in the pop-up form.

Name: bruce

From: Utah

Bio: 20 year networking veteran

Area of Expertise: Technology Developer/Administrator

Topic: Privacy

Headline: Avatars Do the "Walking"

Nutshell: Avatars - electronic personal agents - will intermediate for real people, protecting privacy.

Vision: A person's interaction with the Internet will soon fall into two catagories: 1) trusted sites and people 2) general interactions. Avatars will serve to isolate the users from the unknown portions of the Internet. You can see this trend starting with junk-mail filters, search engines.

As 3rd-party interactions become comfortable, they move to a trusted position and the user will interact directly with them.

Date Submitted: 11/11/2004