Microsoft Calls for National Privacy Law

tabdelgawad writes "Brian Krebs, who writes the Washington Post's Security Fix Blog notes that Microsoft has just asked Congress to enact a new federal privacy law to preempt the growing hodge-podge of state laws that regulate how companies can use personal information. Go Microsoft!?"

Comments

Hmmmm....

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Anyone else think that Microsoft is trying to buy our love?

Re:Don't let your head explode

[QuantumG]

Exactly my thoughts. Anything the greases the wheels of multinational corporate greed has to be a bad thing. So let's introduce more privacy laws. Maybe on a county by county level, and different laws depending on the annual profits of your company and your previously indicated tendency to evil.

All we need, MS designing privacy law

[KD7JZ]

It will end up requiring MS-Privacy v1.0 for all taxpayers. No linux version available.

the first step

[BushCheney08]

The first step to ensuring that our privacy is protected is to make it federal law that all citizens have a Passport account...

Irony

[divisivemind]

"Microsoft said organizations that maintain private consumer information should have to meet some kind of national standard to prove they have at least taken reasonable steps to protect that data from hackers, viruses, or other kind of loss, theft or disclosure."

I would assume this means said organizations would not be running Microsoft products...

Error

[game kid]

Microsoft Privacy Assurance has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

If you were in the middle of living, the identity you were counting on might be lost.

Please tell Microsoft about this problem.

We have created an error report that you can send to help us improve Our Lobbying Techniques. We will treat this report as an important path towards increased revenue and shareholder appeal.

[Debug]|[Sell soul]|[Smart people can click here and do neither unless they are x86 machine-code pros]

Amended.

[Tackhead]

> That law will read something as follows:
>
> 1. Individuals have no rights to privacy.
> 2. Corporations can do what they want with any data.
>
> That is, they want enshrined in national law the most pernicious possible data standards.

You must be new to K Street. Never miss an opportunity to enshrine a monopoly in legislation by finding a way to render your competitors' business practices, even where they're identical to your own, illegal - while simultaneously granting yourself the permission to do the same thing under color of law.

I've therefore amended your second rule as follows:

2. Corporations that have business models that conflict with that of Microsoft must be held to the most stringent privacy standards.

Although the Constitution is no longer relevant, it's still considered bad form to write a Bill of Attainder", so you have to be a little clever about it.

Thus, you'll typically end up with something like this:

• Subsection 477.104.8453: the "All Your Base" clause - the use of hashes to represent hardware configurations ("GUIDs") for the purposes of managing software licensing, software configuration, and the provision of security updates, is a permitted use of personal information that enhances user privacy and shall not be penalized.
• Subsection 8008.13: the "Booble" clause - the use of hashed unique identifiers ("Cookies") that represent individual software configurations for the purposes of providing stateful web browsing, search history, the relevance of clickthroughs for search engines, is an invasion of privacy punishable by having a chair thrown at oneself before being fucking buried, and then fucking killed.

Re:MS vs. Google

[d34thm0nk3y]

MS is making a strike at google's efforts by putting tighter restrictions on how they can use, and possibly distribute your information in the future.

Good!

Now all we need is for Google to lobby for national software quality control standards and we will be set!

Re:Don't let your head explode

[ozmanjusri]

I'm a nudist you insensitive clod!

I just had lunch, you insensitive clod!