If you use old-fashioned paper money, your transactions aren’t traceable. With electronic money—or with regular credit or conventional debit cards—they might be. What if you were a gay woman, lived in a small Arkansas town, and enjoyed lesbian literature? Or suppose that in the future you were caught up in a divorce and your wife employed a cyberdetective to snoop on your spending habits? DigiCash, a company in Amsterdam, thought it had a solution in the form of anonymous electronic money that you could spend without being traced. Only your digital banker would know for sure. The possibility, of course, gave fits to tax collectors throughout the world. It was one of the reasons why bureaucrats in the United States had lobbied so hard for industry to adopt the Clipper chip, which allowed federal snoops to break its codes. Clearly, however, the Clipper effort could _harm_ U.S. companies. Suppose foreign governments used a similar approach—making it easier to steal commercial secrets from American-owned multinationals? Still another threat to business is from people who might spy on or change data on corporate systems. Hackers got into General Electric computers containing secrets. The solution to these electronic thefts, in many cases, was stronger “firewalls”—electronic gateways between public and private areas. In some instances, however, the threat was exaggerated. Yes, in theory, hackers could turn your home phone into a pay phone or make off with your corporate password or spy on your electronic mail. And some hated commercial activities on the Net and were ready to act. But by far, these were exceptions: most of the better hackers were benign—they saw themselves more as scholars than as snoops and saboteurs. Indeed, old-timers would not use the word “hackers” to describe the malevolent; no, they were “crackers.” Ironically, on the Net, the real worry isn’t hackers but snoopy competitors, who, without necessarily breaking the law, can find out information about prices and new products much more efficiently than before. A rival phone company has paid thousands and thousands of visits to the MCI area on the Web. This must be going on constantly. Earlier, Digital Equipment Corporation offered software demonstrations over the Net and found that its competitors were tying the machines up. More scrupulously, companies could use powerful searching tools such as the Lycos on the Web to seek out files mentioning rivals’ products. They could also send the names of rivals to a computer at Stanford University. And then whenever a company was mentioned in a major Usenet newsgroup, an electronic clipping service would send the information back to them at no charge. A careless engineer or marketer could jeopardize thousands or millions in investments. The answer, of course, is to educate people about the risks.