noteworthy wrote:
My chief complaint was that NYT was making an apples-oranges comparison; there are legal precedents regarding the caller's expectation of privacy with regard to a common carrier, but those precedents do not apply to enhanced services.
What precedents draw a distinction with regard to basic vs. enhanced services? With respect to the 4th Amendment, in the beginning there was mail. You had an expectation of privacy for the contents of envelopes, but not for the things written on them, nor for the contents of post cards. The court extended this framework to telephone services by drawing the peculiar conclusion that dialed number information is not enveloped because the phone company must process it to route your call, but call content is enveloped. This is convenient, but somewhat disingenuous. Unfortunately, Internet packets are a lot more like postcards than envelopes. As far as I know, no court has ever decided whether the 4th amendment applies to Internet communications. Chances are it probably doesn't. The reason its never come up is that Congress created a statutory framework for dealing with these things that few have challenged: The Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The ECPA is weaker then the 4th amendment would be. Its really concerned with protecting information in transit, but once that communication is received, and stored, it becomes very weakly protected. The routing information is, also, very weakly protected. In the past, our most private articles were in our homes, where they were strongly protected by the 4th amendment. Increasingly, our most private articles are stored on website and ISP servers, where they are almost totally unprotected, or they are kept on our laptops, which we carry through international border checkpoints on a regular basis. This is how the idea of personal privacy dies.... The court system is either unwilling or unable to adapt their protections as technology advances, holding on to an anachronistic idea of how privacy is defined that ignores the complexities of the modern world, and allowing Congress to insert statutes into the vaccum that are written by law enforcement and fueled by the fear of terrorism. Cryptography will become the new 4th amendment, and ironically the only people who'll really be hurt by it in the long run are the Law Enforcement interests who claimed the need to access this information in the first place! Decius wrote: As time goes on from the search, the risks associated with holding on to that information far exceed the value of storing it.
Is that really true? Or is it the time-series compilation of queries that increases the risk?
Obviously the more data you have the greater the impact of a disclosure, but the longer you hold onto the data the more likely a disclosure is to occur, and the lower the value of the data in terms of system management, prediction of interests for marketing reasons, etc... I'd be concerned that too much government intervention could stifle innovation.
Requirements that street worthy automobiles be a certain size and have certain safety characteristics also stifle innovation. There is a balance here as in all things. As the idea of personal privacy is a core tenent of our social contact I think it ought to weigh heavily in the innovation versus regulation question. RE: Enter Search Term Here, Forever | 
