US Will Consider Data Privacy Legislation

US Will Consider Data Privacy Legislation

After information breaches and tracking cookies have been discovered by the community and the government, they both began to worry about the privacy implications coming with the issue. That was the reason why Director of the Consumer Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington discussed a proposed privacy reform.

For nearly a decade now the government has been ignoring this problem, until a spate of legislation was introduced, specifically designed to offer consumers their rights over how their data should be gathered and shared.

The House of Representatives has introduced two separate comprehensive bills, while the Senate also proposed the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights pursuing similar goals. At the same time, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing over privacy issue, followed by the Energy and Commerce Committee, which also discussed the topic next week. As you can see, there were a lot of good signs from both parties.

The interest of Congress upon the issue can be easily explained: Turkey and the United States appeared to be the only developed countries lacking comprehensive legislation that would protect consumer privacy. For example, the United States has a couple of sector-specific laws regarding sensitive data over health and finance, but for everything else, there are no rules for the corporations except “don’t lie about how you share information.”

While the Federal Trade Commission is doing what it can to enforce such prohibition, risk-averse lawyers admit that the only way to not violate the above mentioned rule is simply to not make explicit privacy promises at all. However, it’s unclear what would happen to the corporate privacy policies – today the corporations do reserve the right to use, sell or share your data, and you are unable to really find out what they do with your privacy information. The reason is that the current legislation encourages corporations not to make concrete disclosures.

In fact, the problem wasn’t so deep within the past decade. But now, in our digital era, social networking and data storage pose much higher risks. Compared to a few years ago, when just a couple major sites could drop a cookie to “anonymously” track your activities, now one might be the owner of hundreds of trackers knowing their offline identity. So, where all the data go?

Protection by Command Prompt

Protection by Command Prompt and Changing DNS Server

The web is full of descriptions on how to bypass the Internet censoring suggested by the US government. Since many users and industry observers like Drew Wilson agree that people should have a right to protect themselves from probably unconstitutional legislation, below are a couple more methods you can use to circumvent the website filtering.

Command Prompt

This works in Windows operating system. There you can open up command prompt (if you don’t know that is that and where to find the tool, refer to Windows Help) and type in “ping [required domain name]”. By doing this you will easily obtain a server IP address to use it in future, even if the domain name is blocked.

As you can understand, it requires no installation or downloading of any content, since command prompt is integrated into Windows, so you will use software you already have on your PC. This method can be called the fastest way to protect yourself from censorship. It is also the easiest one – technically, you will need just one command to obtain what you are looking for. On the other hand, there are a few disadvantages of using this tool. First of all, you have to obtain the data you are after through command prompt before the domain in question is filtered. In addition, you can only obtain one IP address at a time when using this method. Finally, if the site in question changes IP address for its server, you will consequently lose access to the website unless you obtain the new address as well.

Changing DNS Server

Since censoring DNS servers is the main part of the suggested PROTECT IP Act, you may come to a conclusion that only DNS servers residing in the United States will be affected. Therefore, you can always use a DNS server from abroad, like ones used by overseas Internet service providers. After changing your DNS server, you will be no longer relying on a server which can be blocked by the American government or corporate interests.

This method also requires no additional installation or downloading of any software, since everything you will need is on your PC already. The solution is a few menu clicks away and can always be changed again in future without too much hassle. However, using this method can cause a security risk to your PC if you don’t perform things properly. In addition, it is currently difficult to obtain DNS server IP addresses surely available for the nearest future. Nor there’s any guarantee that broadband providers won’t start blocking such activity of their subscribers.

ISP Will Have to Ban NewzBin2

ISP Will Have to Ban NewzBin2

While the largest entertainment companies are doing their best at censoring the web in the US through the suggested PROTECT IP Act, corporate-sponsored filtering has already come into life in the United Kingdom due to what might become to as a landmark court case.

Now it can be said legally that the web got a little more censored. The British media reported that Hollywood had recently won a major court case in which they were able to compel Internet service providers to block access to virtually any website they want in the name of fighting copyright violation. In this case there was general access to online service known as NewzBin2, which offered an index of NZB files. The matter is that the NZB files point to a file uploaded to file-sharing network UseNet. It is a little like a .torrent file, but it isn’t stored on other people’s PCs, but rather on a server or several of them.

So, by granting the entertainment industry the right to block access to NewzBin2, the only thing the court ruling really does is enable international corporations to censor the web in the United Kingdom. In fact, blocking the service won’t amount to anything in the end except a temporary minor inconvenience for some Internet users.

The most interesting in the judge’s ruling was his words that the UK Internet service provider BT had actual knowledge of subscribers using its service in order to infringe copyright. In other words, it knew that the Internet users and Newbin2 owners infringed copyright on a large scale. Even when BT had argued that the service in question also linked to legitimate content, the court said it was far outweighed by pirated content. So, the judge suggested that Internet service providers knew what everyone on their network was doing, like the operators of a major subway network knew precisely where everyone in the network was going. Meanwhile, even scarier was the suggestion that legitimate material was no excuse to stop the filtering of a site.

The bizarre part of the story is that the censorship of NewzBin2 will be enforced only in a few months. This will undoubtedly give the service lots of time to find out how to bypass the measure for its British users. In future, activities like this may affect users willing to use the web for legitimate purposes, but it is very unlikely that it’ll manage to even come close to putting a dent on file-sharing.