Congress should bring the existing laws on electronic privacy up to speed with today's cloud-computing technologies such as Web-based e-mail and online productivity apps, Microsoft's head lawyer said Wednesday.
SmithGeneral Counsel Brad Smith told the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C., that the 24-year-old federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) should be overhauled. Microsoft is calling for greater transparency around the privacy practices of cloud-service providers, better enforcement of cyber crimes, consistency among international laws and clearer rules on the privacy of people's online communications.
In his prepared statement (PDF), Smith gave two examples of inconsistent privacy protection under the current ECPA, which was enacted in 1986:
While this law has served us well for many years, continual advances in technology -- most particularly the advent of low cost Internet-based computing and storage services -- have called into question whether ECPA is adequate to meet our needs as a society today and into the future. For example, under ECPA, emails stored for less than 180 days receive greater privacy protections than emails stored for a longer period. And while information stored on a hard drive would be fully protected by the Fourth Amendment, under ECPA a single email might be subject to multiple legal standards, depending upon whether it is stored and waiting to be read or whether it has been opened. While treating emails differently in these circumstances might have made sense in 1986, it is no longer justified in light of unprecedented digitization and indefinite storage of personal information online.
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Source: blog.seattlepi.com
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