The basic issue comes down to the fact that Fox and Access are file access based RDBMs. They directly read and write to the actual data files instead of going through a communication interface, as in client/server. This means that the user must have access to the file. With this access, the users can effectively do anything they want to with the file (eg. open it in Word and type garbage into it, or email it to a competitor). For Web based servers, this is not an issue because the only access is through COM objects which provide the security layer, there is no direct file I/O by the user.