Google, Facebook go retro in push to update 1986 privacy law

For a few hours on Capitol Hill yesterday evening, it was October 1986 again, complete with legwarmers, an Apple IIc, pop rocks, Duran Duran, and cell phones the size of a cat.

The companies sponsoring this night of nostalgia include Google and Facebook, which are hoping to visibly highlight how out-of-date a law enacted 25 years ago today has become in an age of cloud computing, gigabit networks, and terabyte storage.

The law in question is the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a statute written in the pre-Internet era of telephone modems and the black-and-white Macintosh Plus. A coalition of groups, which include liberal, conservative, and libertarian non-profit organizations as well as companies, hope to convince the U.S. Congress to update the law to include location privacy and to protect documents stored on the Web through services like Google Docs, Flickr, and Picasa. (CNET was the first to report on the creation of this Digital Due Process coalition last year.)

Their not-so-subtle intent of yesterday's back-to-the-future blast: to woo congressional staff. That meant convening this privacy-law bacchanal, probably the first the nation's capital has ever experienced, a few blocks from the Senate and House offices at Top of the Hill on Pennsylvania Avenue, which describes itself as a "World War II-era lounge" featuring "an extensive wine, champagne and martini list."

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Source: news.cnet.com
By: Declan McCullagh