Spy act - another piece of poor leglislation

Filed in archive Spam News on April 25, 2007

Reading InfoWorld's Ed Foster today I had a feeling I was doing my term papers on George Orwell's 1984 again. And I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that the US is trying to pass another bill which deals with internet spread diseases (spyware to be exact), but at the same time 'silently' allowing hardware, software and other vendors, as well as ISPs, to spy on you without you ever knowing:

"Let's sum up. If the Spy Act become law, hardware, software, and network vendors will be granted carte blanche to use spyware themselves to police their customers' use of their products and services. Incredibly broad exceptions will probably allow even the worst of the adware outfits to operate with legal cover. State attempts to deal with the spyware problem will be pre-empted and enforcement left up almost entirely to the FTC. Gee, what's not to like in that deal?"

If you're thirsty for more, check out the Slashdot discussion on the subject, while you can find the whole SpyAct here.

What is even more disturbing (and knowing how readily Microsoft cooperates with anyone with a subpoena) the new Vista operating system will allow 'legal' spying even easier.

As I know better than to believe big companies have my interest and my privacy protection on their minds, I'm seriously thinking on switching to Knoppix or any other Linux distribution. And connecting to the internet through proxies.