e-ignite

A recent ruling in a Federal Appeals Court in the United States has extended the rights of privacy to email. In short, the judge ruled that law enforcement agencies need warrants in order to gain access to a suspect’s emails.

The full story can be read at Wired.com, but I’ve summarised the main points in the quotes below:

“A federal appeals court on Monday issued a landmark decision that holds that e-mail has similar constitutional privacy protections as telephone communications, meaning that federal investigators who search and seize emails without obtaining probable cause warrants will now have to do so.”

“The case boiled down to a Fourth Amendment argument, in which Warshak contended that the government overstepped its constitutional reach when it demanded e-mail records from his internet service providers. Under the 1986 federal Stored Communications Act (SCA), the government has regularly obtained e-mail from third parties without getting warrants and without letting targets of an investigation know (ergo, no opportunity to contest).”

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The recent release of “iTunes Plus” has been over-shadowed by many users complaining about the fact that personal details have been embedded in the purchased track tags. Personally, I hardly find this surprising and I’d go so far to say that some users are citing “privacy concerns” as a reason to break the law, breach copyright and illegally share songs.

A bit of history: the Hymn Project is one of the oldest methods for users to remove the copy protection from songs legally purchased through iTunes (prior to version 7). This has been heralded as a “consumer champion” since it allows users to play their purchased songs on whatever equipment they like. Legalities aside, it is widely used and liked by many users. One of the key points in the Hymn Project, however, is that it removes the copy protection, but retains all the purchaser’s details on the track tags. The removal of the purchaser’s details was possible according to the Hymn site, but they saw no justification to do so.  The makers of Hymn rightly state that they do not condone piracy, they are simply exercising their rights to use their legally purchased content how they see fit without being guilty of piracy.

Now, with iTunes Plus offering DRM free downloads, several sites feature complaints that this “hidden user information” is a major breach of privacy. I don’t think so.

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