More on Internet Privacy Legislation

Last week we noted that Senator Hollings had introduced a privacy bill and that there were likely to be more introduced. Now Salon has a piece critical of Hollings' bill. EPIC wrote about it as well, and they seem to think it's not too bad, all things considered. Read Hollings' bill yourself and decide who's right. Also of note is a bill introduced in the House that would require all Federal agencies to prepare privacy impact statements (the ACLU has a summary) akin to the environmental impact statements now required for actions adversely affecting the environment. Seems like a good idea to me.

Comments

heh, and now we mix it

[tandr]

with this and guess which one will prevail ?

(title of the page is "The state Legislature has given police power to search your home without telling you why."

Sigh ...

[ProfMoriarty]

The problem with OPPA (as its currently called) is obvious (to those who read the article).

Unfortunately, this legislation looks likely it would pass, since it isn't as obvious to what's really going on ...

The second is "nonsensitive" information, and among that will include your name, address, and records of anything you buy or surf on the Internet.

Under the act, business can't collect or divulge the sensitive bits without your express consent, but anything classified as nonsensitive can be freely collected and sold at will.

Lessig on privacy and fair use

[jonathanjo]

Lawrence Lessig, in his book "Code", points out that the trend in the commodification of the web is for our personal information to be traded and sold by companies without our consent, and meanwhile for corporate "intellectual property" to be protected from unauthorized use with the full force of code and law.

Lessig argues that these situations should be exactly reversed. Personal info should be treated as property owned by us; anyone who takes it without our consent should be subject to lawsuit or criminal charges, and if we choose to allow it to get bought & sold, we should get a cut of the proceeds. It's our data, after all. But for other types of data that doesn't identify any individual, including copywrighted works, there should be mechanisms that allow us fair use to use them and share them as we will, without actually overstepping our rights under copyright law. As it is, as we all know, our rights under copyright are being eroded by encryption and the DMCA. We should have that kind of infrastructure (*and* law) protecting our personal data that the RIAA wants to have protecting their work.

J