Agriya

Just about the time that everyone began to dare to look up again after a couple of slow years in the US government initiative against illegal file sharers, comes now a fresh assault. The Swedish file-sharing service ThePirateBay is all over the news for having been ordered shut, and for having its founders jailed. Private file-sharers in the US are being fined $100,000 apiece again and the British and French governments have announced something like a three-strike policy against illegal file sharers. File-sharing downloaders who are caught lapping up copyrighted material by their ISP are to be reported the first time, and will hear a warning shot: they will have their Internet speeds strangled. Persistent offenders will be cut off from the Internet forever. These new measures should come into force in less than two years. But is it even legal to cut someone off from access to what has become the most basic of communication tools?

Those in power feel that it isn’t big deal, because as a practical matter, most people will take their warnings seriously and cease to break the law. But knowledgeable civil rights activists see a slippery slope here, that descends into speech restrictions. Not to say that the situation is not alarming; the British music and film industries employ millions of people; having their creative product used for free has already begun to tell on employment prospects for many creative people.

But Internet service providers themselves protest the excessive heavy handedness of this measure. It could just owe to how the law expects the ISPs to pay for the costs of the implementation. But really, is there a way to tell which side has the fair argument? The powerful free spirits who support copyright infringement and file-sharing have an excellent point. Their claim is that music is a product that is priced artificially high by a cartel of manufacturers who collude to keep their prices high. Do they really deserve sympathy any more than the rich oil producing nations that thrive on artificially high prices?

Privacy advocates around the world have always been strongly critical of Google for its ability to obtain , store and study information obtained from users over the course of a regular Google search or another service. When a visitor uses a Google service, Google installs a tracking cookie on the user’s browser, to remember user preferences and to improve speed in the event of a return visit. Why is this a problem though? The problem lies in the loose way privacy laws are able to be interpreted. Take a lawsuit that Google encountered about four years ago that got all privacy advocates very concerned.  In that case, the US government summarily subpoenaed Google for all the search information it had received over the preceding couple of months. That particular subpoena did not ask for identification of who had searched for what; but it legally well could have.  Gmail also studies by automated computers, all the information on your private email, to be able to target advertising to you.

To give the protesters’ cause a boost perhaps, and also some bite to their bark, Google has released an easy-to-access , Google Dashboard service that allows account holders to see exactly how much information Google has gathered about them over the years. The Google Dashboard application is available on the Google account holder’s home page for the eyes of the authenticated account holder only. You might wonder if the information you share with Google today was really significant enough to get worked up over. A quick look at a Google account holder page shows how little usable personal information there is to be found there. They have information about how many e-mails you store on your account, what YouTube videos you have watched ever, and what kinds of searches you perform. Things only get on there however when you do them while signed in.

Perhaps it is the principle of the thing that gets the  privacy advocates concerned. It is completely conceivable that the main concern here is that to let go of a little privacy now could start society down on a slippery slope of ever-receding individual rights.

The lines between reality and virtual reality are getting increasingly blurred. In Japan a woman was arrested and charged for murdering her husband. A tragic but commonplace crime you might say but the husband she was charged for murdering was not real. The woman, a 43-year-old piano teacher, and her ‘husband’, a 33-year-old office worker were players in an online game in which their avatars met and got married. Suddenly, one day, the online ‘husband’ divorced his online ‘wife’. The enraged lady retaliated by logging in to the game using his login and killing his character thereby murdering her online ‘ex’. The bereaved man lodged a protest with the police and she was arrested, not for murder however, but for illegally accessing the account.

As more and more people create identities and lives online the definition of materiality is being altered, perhaps, forever. Take, for example, Second Life – a 3D virtual world developed by Linden Lab that enables its users, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents (avatars) can explore, meet other residents, socialize, even get married and divorced, and create, own and trade in virtual property and services, or travel the world, which is called the grid. Second Life has its own virtual currency – the Linden Dollar which can be traded on real life currency exchanges. Some countries even have embassies in Second Life. A theft or fraud in Second Life can have material consequences in the real world.

It is becoming generally accepted that virtual property has real value and virtual crimes have spawned a whole new class of crime in real life. Not just virtual crime but crime committed using virtual space is also coming on the radar now. Shannon Jackson of Hendersonville, Tennessee was arrested after she violated a court order by poking a woman on Facebook. The alleged poke was considered a violation of the terms of the order which were, “no telephoning, contacting or otherwise communicating with the petitioner.” Internet users must understand that online actions can have serious offline consequences and be very careful about how they work and play on the Net.

The thing about the Internet is that in sitting in your home, putting your thoughts and personal information out, you are tricked into believing you have privacy; and in a password-protected Internet life how easy it is to take for granted how vulnerable we become without it.

Everyone has elderly relatives who need to be in on all that happens in the lives of the children in the family – birthday parties, school events; often, to help the technically uninitiated elderly relative, people just post their children’s pictures and videos on a place like Facebook without password protection or even on a YouTube clone website. They figure that their video is lost in the crowd of millions of others; what predator is really going to find it?

People only wake up to how easy it is for people to find it, when things get out of hand; people anywhere on earth roam the Internet, put together freely available media files and use them for anything – for a school project, for plastering all over the walls of a city a thousand miles away to advertise a baby show, or merely to share among friends. It can be very easy to let one mistake get out of hand.

Even where personal views on the subject tend to the liberal, there is always the serious consideration of how other people might react to your media-posting activities. Birthday party pictures, school event videos and the like, usually include images of other people’s children too. People take a dim view of having decisions about their children taken without their consent. If the parent of a friend of your child’s finds a picture of his child at your child’s birthday at a recognizable restaurant or park, they can right away worry about how a sick predator out there can find their child if they wish to. There’s also the matter of setting a good example for your child in online safety; if you go about posting personal pictures at random on the Internet, how will you ever tell your child to exercise caution himself?