The Tug O' War Between Privacy And Data Retention
from the let-the-lobbyists-sort-it-out dept
It's no secret that the government has been pushing for more stringent data retention laws, on the belief (which many question) that by forcing ISPs to collect all this data, it will better help criminal and terrorist investigations. At the same time, the recent leak of data by AOL has some pushing in the completely opposite direction, suggesting there should be laws that ban companies from collecting and holding onto too much data. In fact, we noted earlier this year that the AOL leak may have caused some politicians to rethink their position on data retention. Adam Thierer, over at the Tech Liberation Front, has also noticed these two diametrically opposed issues, and wonders how search engines are going to deal with being pulled from both sides. Hopefully, the answer is that the back and forth on these two issues has a better chance of making sure that nothing happens, and things are pretty much left as is. This may turn out to be the best solution for everyone.
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privacy and data retention
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Don't agree
For good reasons most countries with data protection laws forbid the transmission of data to the US, even if it is within the same company.
What is needed are laws that put constraints on how much data a company can hold on a person and what they can do with it especially in regards to selling it on but no laws on how much has to be kept (outside of already international standards in areas like financial/banking transactions)
A good template to follow would be the UK's Data protection act, without the exemptions
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Scary ... or Not ...
I agree that there should be laws and that data needs protection, but the typical knee-jerk reaction generally displayed by governments might not be the most appropriate wat to go about doing that.
Yes we need laws; but just this once could they be well thought-out and intelligent. Possibly formulated with the rights of the people in mind as opposed to which business interest can benefit the most from writing the laws in which fashion .... I know government "For the people" is a concept that most politicians & law-makers have a hard time comprehending, but maybe this once they could try it. If they don't think they llike it they can go back to their normal chaos on the next issue.
Just my opinion and it ain't worth the paper I wrote it on ...
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