It's Mine!

There's a move afoot to restrict the ability of companies to collect and store your personal internet activity like what you search for and what sites you visit. I'm all for that. Time and time again it's been shown that the government and industry are unable to adequately secure the information they collect and keep it out of the hands of thieves. Just today I read about Indian call centers selling personal information that was out-sourced to them.

There are those who oppose the protection of our privacy. The government and other organizations, rather than restricting the warehousing of our personal data, scream for search engines, ISP's and others to store more of our information, and for longer periods of time, to make it easier for them to go after people it believes are violating the law.

While I'm in favor of making it easier to pursue justice, I have a problem with the idea of having non-government organizations mandated to store information for the government. First, it costs money to store information. If the government wants information to be stored, how is it fair that it forces others to do the work and foot the expense? The government should compensate companies when forced to perform work solely for the benefit of government. Secondly, I don't trust companies to protect our personal information. If the government wants information stored, it should obtain it and store it themselves. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of faith in the government's security skills, either.

The bottom line is, I'm in favor of restricting the collection and storage of our actions by default. If someone is suspected of a crime, let the authorities get a warrant and force the collection of that suspect's information going forward. I'm opposed to archiving our lives just in case prosecutors want to go on a fishing expedition.

via John Battelle's Searchblog


Blog Tag: Opinion