[292] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Prosecuter Demands Years of Full Web Logs From
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Fri Oct 19 18:33:50 2007
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Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:07:07 -0700
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Prosecuter Demands Years of Full Web Logs From Newspaper
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000322.html
Greetings. I and many others have long warned how Web logs could be
abused by overzealous law enforcement. Now comes a prime example
that is sweeping in its scope.
The Phoenix "New Times" has broken its silence regarding August
grand jury subpoenas it received, which demanded essentially total
access to all information in its Web site logs, including explicitly
all information about every single visitor to the site, beginning in
January 2004 ( http://tinyurl.com/yuafpw ).
How this will all turn out is unclear as of now. The link above
discusses the particulars of the case in detail, and I won't attempt
to summarize it all here. But this is definitely a case worth
following, especially if you still are of the belief that such
outside abuse of logged Web data on a large scale is merely a
theoretical concept.
If you run Web sites, please remember this and please remember it
well: Any information that you collect regarding visitors to your
sites can be demanded by a court or other officials for any reason
that they can push through the legal system (in the light of day or
in secret) -- your published privacy policies be damned.
All it may require is one serious breach of privacy trust with your
users to shake their confidence in your operations forever, and even
for the largest and most powerful of Web services, users can desert
you at the flick of a URL.
Trust is at the heart of users' relationships with the Web services
that they patronize. If such services put themselves in a position
where they and their users may be victimized by unreasonable outside
demands for log and other related data, the risks to the Web and
Internet at large are immense indeed.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
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