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12.02.08 Are The Days Of A Dishonest Internet Over?  By Dan MorrillAre the days of lying on the internet over with? If you take a close look at the results from the Lori Drew Cyber Bullying case, this might just be the case. In case you missed it this weekend, Lori Drew was charged with three misdemeanor crimes in her actions when it came to the Megan Meyer MySpace suicide scandal. Each misdemeanor carries a maximum one year sentence and a 100,000 dollar fine. At this point though, out on Groklaw, and on multiple other sites, the questions are arising about violating a Terms of Service on a web site. If for example I state that no one should ever rip my stuff from my web site in a click wrapped TOS, everyone who uses RSS to read my stuff (against my TOS mind you) including those Google reader users, and other users could be found guilty under the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) which is what Lori Drew was found guilty of doing (Violating a TOS). Taking this to the absurd edge the web site Volokh has set up a new terms of service, which unfortunately for me I might have violated by not reading that first, but going to the article that I was really interested in. Too keep other people out of trouble like I am going to be in a moment when they figure this out - here is a Google Cache version of the file, which they will probably cover later in a new and revised TOS, which Google will promptly violate, and everyone who looks at the Cache file will also promptly violate.
PC World though goes into the privacy issues which are the real important part of all this, while a lot of things wrong have been done under the name of anonymity, there are cases and times when anonymity is very important. Thinking back to the time when Yahoo released the details of a Chinese blogger, who ended up in Jail as one of those times when Anonymity was very important. It is not enough then that we could get charged with a Misdemeanor for violating a Terms of Service, but the very idea of when and how to use anonymity is now in question. That does not bode well for a future internet state when most of us do not read the TOS for the web sites that we engage with. Just here at Toolbox, there are a number of policies in the TOS that feed in and build out a complete set of policies that guides how users can interact with the service. So for every spam membership or friend request does that mean that Toolbox can go back and sue those people? Under the ruling (and it is in review process) technically Toolbox could do that. This is where the internet gets to be interesting, and why this might just end up being a bad precedent for the law, and how people interact with web sites in the future. More things to consider on a Monday morning, over the thanksgiving weekend the internet changed, and now it is up to many smart legal people to work out the actual implications of what just went down. The real question is can we really handle an honest internet? Comments About the Author: Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management. Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through his blog, Managing Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the ITtoolbox blogging community. |
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