From "The Register" this morning...
tell me this law doesn't have "ripe for abuse" written all over it!A new law being sold as a way to fight "software piracy" and "illegal music trading" may
require websites/servers to track everyone that visits their site. But who's to say they couldn't use this information to track what political or social sites you visit?
And it gets worse...Websites could be required to retain visitor info
By Mark Rasch, SecurityFocusPublished Wednesday 8th August 2007 10:26 GMT
A series of legal events means that companies that have no business reason to retain documents or records may be compelled to create and retain such records just so they can become available for discovery.
Companies routinely create, maintain and store electronic records. Some records are consciously created – like memoranda, letters, spreadsheets, and even e-mails and chat or instant message communications. Other records are created inadvertently, like meta data, log records, IP history records and the like. Some information is useful to the company, and it wants to retain it, and other information is of little use, merely takes up space, creates potential liability, and represents an unwarranted threat for attack or violation of privacy. The problem for most companies in developing or maintaining a document retention/destruction policy is identifying the documents and records it wants to keep and effectively purging the ones it doesn't want. Some recent legal events have made the problem of document retention and destruction even more complicated.
A recent case involving file sharing site
TorrentSpy illustrates the point.
(...)
After TorrentSpy was sued, the question arose about whether or not
the information NOT regularly collected by TorrentSpy – the information in RAM – constituted Electronically Stored Information subject to both discovery and what is called a litigation hold.(...)
The court rejected TorrentSpy's claims that the information in RAM was never "stored" since logging was never enabled, and that requiring TorrentSpy to enable logging amounted to requiring it to "create"; records that didn't exist. Certainly, the information in RAM was – for a brief time – stored at least transitory, just as streaming media (
like a VOIP call, or videoconference) is stored on your computer for the brief interval it is being displayed.
Thus, the information is (1) electronic; (2) stored; and (3) relevant. The consequence of this is that not only is the information subject to discovery under the TorrentSpy precedent, but the entity must then suspend its document deletion policy, which in the case of TorrentSpy was to delete information in RAM that it never stored.
The potential consequences of this ruling (which is currently on appeal) are frightening. Whenever a company or other entity learns that information that it doesn't collect (or more accurately collects but doesn't store more than briefly) might be relevant to some litigation,
it has to undertake affirmative efforts to start collecting and storing this information, in violation of its express privacy policy (creating potential FTC or privacy commission liability) for no purpose other than to create liability.
Thus, when you learn of the possibility of litigation, you may have to
START storing streaming media, contents of VOIP calls, contents of videoconferences, webinars, chats, instant messages, logs, scans, or other electronic records that you never stored before.
(Read the full story at "
The Register")
You read right, the effects of this law could require Internet hosts to start recoding your VOIP phone calls, Instant Messages, video conferences... ANY digitally transmitted communication.
How is this any different from "Big Brother" putting a two-way "Viewscreen" in every person's home?
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
