Would You Secure Personal Data With DRM Tools?

museumpeace writes "From its own EmTech conference, Technology Review reports on a privacy strategy from Microsoft's Craig Mundie: When sharing music online took off in the 1990s, many companies turned to digital rights management (DRM) software as a way to restrict what could be done with MP3s and other music files — only to give up after the approach proved ineffective and widely unpopular. Today Craig Mundie, senior advisor to the CEO at Microsoft, resurrected the idea, proposing that a form of DRM could be used to prevent personal data from being misused." Mundie also thinks it should be a felony to misuse that data. He thinks larger penalties would help deter shady organizations from harvesting data the user isn't even aware of. "More and more, the data that you should be worried about, you don’t even know about."

Comments

Completely idiotic...

[evilviper]

In this case, the "DRM" in question a tiny bit of metadata saying "please don't do X with this".

Sure, your data is encrypted, but as with all DRM, you're giving out the decryption key along with it. It was always a stupid idea that can NEVER work.

If you want to see the end result of well-implemented DRM, see Blu-rays... Everybody can play and copy any Blu-ray disc they want, but somebody has to go through the small hassle to do so. If the official player programs weren't closed-source and heavily obfuscated, it wouldn't even take any effort at all. That is really why Microsoft likes to push DRM... It's a back-door way to eliminate open source software from consideration.

So the crux of his point is: âoeYou want to say that there are substantial legal penalties for anyone that defies the rules in the metadata. I would make it a felony to subvert those mechanisms.â

Without the laws in place to enforce that, DRM doesn't help you AT ALL. With the laws in place to restrict what can be done with your private information, YOU DON'T NEED THE DRM.

clever trick

[duckintheface]

When Microsoft suggests anything to "protect" the user, I immediately look for the trap. In this case it's easy to find. When DRM violations are made a felony, it won't be a felony only when the violated party is the user. This is a back door way to make DRM violations against big corporations a felony. This has nothing to do with protecting users and everything to do with helping corporations.