The CEO of Sun Microsystems,--infamous for his pronouncement, "You have zero privacy anyway--Get over it."--took a conciliatory tone on the stage here, allowing that privacy might be something for which consumers should fight. He warned companies that, unless they protect consumer privacy, they could lose out on significant online growth.

"It's going to get scarier if we don't come up with technology and rules to protect appropriately privacy and secure the data, and the most important asset we have is obviously the data on people--our customers and employees and partners," McNealy told attendees last week. "And if we can't protect that, people are not going to go online."

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