20.1. Introduction

Soon after I started work on my comprehensive privacy tool, I discovered that I could not decide which features it should include. Privacy tools were a new category of software tools in 1995: many had very specific and novel features that were critical to some people but useless to others. There was no consensus on which features were important to have. Nobody even knew which of the tools that were available for download even worked!

Trolling on the Internet I found some web sites that had basic descriptions of some programs; sometimes, these sites even included ratings. But I couldn't find any comprehensive catalogs of the tools that were available.