[CLUE-Talk] * Comcast Tracks Websurfers, EFF Calls for Wipeout

[Jeff Cann]

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- From this week's EFFector 17.12 -- http://www.eff.org/

* Comcast Tracks Websurfers, EFF Calls for Wipeout

San Francisco, CA - EFF filed a friend-of-the-court brief this week asking a 
federal appeals court to overturn a district court's ruling that Comcast 
Cable did not violate federal privacy law when it secretly logged its 
customers' web-surfing habits.

At issue in the case is whether Comcast collected "personally identifiable 
information" (PII).  The lower court found that since Comcast covertly linked 
customers' online surfing patterns to a particular computer IP address rather 
than to a name, the company was not collecting personally identifiable 
information.  Yet Comcast could easily have matched the IP address to the 
customer at any time.

"Taken to its logical conclusion, the district court's argumeny would mean 
that even your phone number and address do not qualify as personally 
identifiable information, since the informationcannot be used to identify you 
without additional information from the phone book," said Kevin Bankston, EFF 
attorney and Equal Justice Works/Bruce J. Ennis Fellow.  "Unless overturned, 
this decision could render useless a number of federal privacy statutes 
specifically written to safeguard information that could be used to identify 
you."

EFF amicus brief in the case:
<http://www.eff.org/Privacy/20040408_Klimas_v_Comcast_Amicus_Brief.pdf>


- -- 
"Faith that does not affect a person's culture is a faith not fully embraced, 
not entirely thought out, not faithfully lived."
- - Pope John Paul II

http://isuma.org/


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