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Electronic Privacy Act Turns 25; No Celebrations!
By siliconindia
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Monday, 24 October 2011, 23:13 IST
Bangalore: About a quarter century ago, the Electronic Communication Privacy Act was passed by the U.S. government. However, the Govt. then did not anticipate a world interconnected by personal computers, the internet, smart phones and social media like Facebook. The time has come to update this law.
Technology has advanced a lot ever since 1986, when the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) became law. Cell phones no longer appear like bricks. Thirteen-pound laptops, such as the IBM PC Convertible with a processor running at 4.77 MHz and 256KB of memory are not slender.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) turned 25 years old. The "Aging 'Privacy' Law," ECPA was passed "at a time when e-mail was used mostly by nerdy scientists, when phones without wires hardly worked, as you stepped out into the backyard; when the World Wide Web did not exist. Four presidencies later,(ECPA) has aged dramatically, providing little protection for citizens from the government's prying eyes, despite the law's language remaining much the same.", reports Wired.
There needs to be a law to ensure we are not forced to choose between using new technology and keeping our private lives, private. There should be equal privacy rights while we make a phone call on a new mobile phone or use our existing landline, or when we send an email through a new online services instead of a letter though the postal mail.
