Sir Tim said moves to undermine encryption would be a "bad idea" and represent a massive security breach. Home Secretary Amber Rudd has said there should be no safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online. But Sir Tim said giving the authorities a key to unlock coded messages would have serious consequences.
"Now I know that if you're trying to catch terrorists it's really tempting to demand to be able to break all that encryption but if you break that encryption then guess what - so could other people and guess what - they may end up getting better at it than you are," he said.
Sir Tim also criticised moves by legislators on both sides of the Atlantic, which he sees as an assault on the privacy of web users. He attacked the UK's recent Investigatory Powers Act, which he had criticised when it went through Parliament: "The idea that all ISPs should be required to spy on citizens and hold the data for six months is appalling."
I still think my web crawler idea has merit here.
The web's creator also said he was shocked by the direction the US Congress and Senate had taken when they voted to scrap laws preventing internet service providers from selling users' data. He said privacy online was as important as the trust between a doctor and a patient. "We're talking about it being just a human right that my ability to communicate with people on the web, to go to websites I want without being spied on is really, really crucial."
I agree, however, if it's a case of selling my data in aggregate without personally identifiable information, then I'd be probably be mostly OK with that.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39490324
I believe the US is making it so that the selling of personal information (not just aggregate data) is perfectly legal. After all, it allows corporations to make more money, and that is who the Republicans represent.
ReplyDeleteI'm seeing very conflicting information about that. If they have the rights to sell personal, identifiable data, that's an entirely different matter.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to web browsing habits, aggregate data has a nasty habit of leaking identifiable information. Just taking Google+ as an example... by looking at which G+ URL's are most often visited per IP address, you'd fairly quickly be able to link IP's to people's profiles.
ReplyDeleteIf you aggregate stuff well enough to avoid this (e.g. "This IP often visits plus.google.com") then the information is probably not very commercially valuable.
Given that the UK seems hell bent on doing stupid stuff, I'm now tunnelling all my web traffic from home through the VPN connection I previously used just to get IPV6 connectivity. I run the computer at the other end of that VPN and the hosting provider is a small enough company that I don't expect them to find commercial gain from capturing my data.
Rhys Taylor Your comment got be reading a bit more, and yes, it's incredibly unclear. I am being pretty partisan, especially considering I'm not American, but the current breed of Republican seems to have embraced free-market capitalism as a myopic ideology.
ReplyDeleteI agree, however, if it's a case of selling my data in aggregate without personally identifiable information, then I'd be probably be mostly OK with that.
ReplyDeleteDon't be. It turns out that data can be aggregated from multiple sources to penetrate most efforts to make data "personally unidentifiable." It was also recently demonstrated that even with an active VPN connection it is possible to identify specific streaming videos by the pattern of compression artifacts.
The Obama Administration was perfectly correct that this should simply not be legal. Period.
Berners-Lee is a boot licker pussy. He complains about governments but yields easily to commercial interests. He is afraid about the US and UK breaking the net? Then why is he accepting DRM into the web standards?
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