From time to time, we see unenlightened comments about the efficacy of laws in the fight against spam. "Laws won't stop spam" being the most common. No, they won't. What laws do is dissuade some people from undertaking shoddy mailing practices or even outright spam campaigns. Laws don't stop murder, rape and robbery either, but for those un-dissuaded who undertake such heinous crimes, we, as a society, have laws for punitive effect. They pay the price society exacts for their actions. C-28 will attenuate spam in Canada, and help us to fight spam internationally. more
Remember when Gmail launched in 2004, and everyone said it was going to kill Hotmail, Yahoo!, and AOL? Six years later, and this chart shows pretty clearly that while gmail has grown, only AOL's pageviews have fallen. The rest have held fairly steady. So what's everyone freaking out about? more
Last week hundreds of privacy regulators, corporate officers, and activists gathered in Jerusalem, Israel for the annual Data Protection and Privacy Commissioner Conference. ... Many acknowledged that longstanding privacy norms are being increasingly challenged by the massive popularity of social networks that encourage users to share information that in a previous generation would have never been made publicly available for all the world to see. more
Someone needs to take a good hard look at those Internet surveillance stories being strategically placed on the front page of the New York Times. There's a trail here, I believe, that's worth following. Here are some data points... there appears to be a deep interest in the ability to declare war online, as evidenced by cybersecurity research and public speeches by Herbert Lin, a key player who has worked on several cybersecurity reports for the National Research Council.
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In the sci-fi movie Minority Report, a 'precrime' police unit relies on the visions of psychics to predict future crimes, then arrests the potential perpetrators before they do anything wrong. In the world of Internet governance, the future is now, as regulators want online services to predict and prevent safety threats before they actually occur. more
Over the past few weeks, regulators have rekindled their interest in an online Do Not Track proposal in hopes of better protecting consumer privacy. ... There are a variety of possible technical and regulatory approaches to the problem, each with its own difficulties and limitations, which I'll discuss in this post. more
In a recent article, I read about increasingly intrusive tracking of online users, which has lead to a proposal at the FTC, "FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said the system would be similar to the Do-Not-Call registry that enables consumers to shield their phone numbers from telemarketers." Maybe I'm dense, but even if this weren't a fundamentally bad idea for policy reasons, I don't see how it could work. more
The White House has recently released a draft of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Some of its ideas are good and some are bad. However, I fear it will be a large effort that will do little, and will pose a threat to our privacy. As I've written elsewhere, I may be willing to sacrifice some privacy to help the government protect the nation; I'm not willing to do so to help private companies track me when it's quite useless as a defense. more
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post posing the question of whether or not more government regulation is required in order to secure the Internet. On the one hand, anonymity is viewed in the west as a forum for freedom of speech. The anonymity of the Internet allows dissidents to speak up against unpopular governments. However, the anonymity afforded by the Internet is not so much by design as it is byproduct of its original designers not seeing how widespread it would eventually become. more
What happens to companies when they get too big for their own good? Do they inadvertently do things that potentially harm our privacy (think Facebook)? Or, do they simply make mistakes that violate our privacy? Well, last month Google revealed that its Street View cars "mistakenly" captured content flowing over wireless networks -- a potential invasion of privacy. more
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