Congress targets social-networking sites

Found on CNet News on Thursday, 29 June 2006
Browse Internet

The concept of forcing companies to record information about their users' Internet activities to aid in future criminal prosecutions took another twist this week.

"How much would it cost your company to preserve those IP addresses?" DeGette asked at a hearing on Wednesday that included representatives from Facebook, Xanga and Fox Interactive Media, the parent company of MySpace. "You're going to store the data indefinitely?"

Michael Angus, executive vice president of Fox Interactive Media, said he agrees with the idea of data retention for MySpace. "As a media company, Fox is very committed to data retention," Angus said. "It helps us police piracy."

In those meetings, Justice Department representatives went beyond the argument that data retention was necessary to protect children--and claimed it would aid in terrorism investigations as well.

"There is more you can do," DeGette said. "You can do algorithms that will go beyond just the date of birth that they register, to start to weed out some of the underage users."

Data retention, the new wonder drug. And just the the wonder drugs before, it does nothing much. The real criminals they are talking about all the time will simply use proxy services and thwart their idea. I'm not even even going to talk about piracy, because I don't see much of an connection between MySpace and piracy. Who knows, perhaps it is in fact a site run by terrorists to facilitate the global trade of the latest movies in order to fund world terrorism; and all those people posting there are just a cover. Algorithms to calculate the age of a visitor? Looks like DeGette heard a new word and stuffed it into a sentence. I wonder how he thinks a computer should calculate the age of its user. The problem isn't the fact that kids can have some dirty talk online. If it gets out of hand, they always can log off (and most systems have a handy ignore function). The trouble starts when things start in real life; and here it's still the job of their parents to keep an eye on their kids. So quit blaming the Internet for everything and do your job as a parent.