Internet privacy law

At some point it dawned on the lawmakers that the access to the private users’ information stored on local computers or the personal data stored elsewhere shall not be subject to unauthorized use and abuse by the involved parties or third persons. Private e-mail addresses, home addresses, phone numbers were distributed, even sold, whereby the owner of the data was unaware of such occurrences. The call erupted to establish an Internet privacy law, whereby the rights of Internet users will be protected.

Very soon such an Internet privacy law became standard, web sites not abiding to the regulations were blacklisted and seemingly the privacy protection worked. But most of the big companies, governments and their agencies are poking holes into the privacy of uses, mainly for no other reason but to better control, manipulate or extort the oblivious user. Some paranoid users use proxies to hide their IP, use firewalls and port blockers to obstruct any incoming contacts, there is even several underground programmed programs, like peer guardian, which protect peer-to-peer users from being located by government and law enforcement agencies when sharing files and data over the Net.

Although there is an Internet privacy law, it is employed differently according to the location, country, local law it has been based on and local culture and decency customs. Besides that, government and their agencies usually do not succumb to such controls, quite at the contrary, do everything they can to undermine the privacy of Internet users in order to better control, manipulate and exploit the broad public. As an example, the American government, unhappy about the Internet privacy law, implemented into the Patriot Act that if the government or any of the agencies suspect a terrorist activity, they have the right to invade anyone’s privacy in every possible way, without a warrant, without having to substantiate such a claim. For good measure they added a new definition for terrorism, which more or less boils down to “everything that endangers, works against or puts into jeopardy any aspect of the American interest, stability and way of life” may be deemed as terrorism, which means that the American government now has the power to spy on, invade the privacy of any person or even abuse any data they can obtain for any purpose they deem fit, making the Internet privacy law obsolete, when it comes to the government.

To bring it to a point: the Internet privacy law is good, only it is not being implemented or is not binding for many government departments and agencies. In terms of consumer, businesses and personal interactions, it works just fine.