1 edit | Federal Bar Against Use of Surfing/Net Use As others have already noted above, it is absolutely unacceptable for ISP's to be treating details of individual user's net/web usage as anything but highly personal and private. There needs to be strong, intelligent, rational, federal legislation (now that's a high hurdle), with serious personal, as well as corporate, criminal, and civil penalties for code violations, and it needs to be enforced, all as soon as possible. Exceptions must be included for the limited release of data for legitimate LE (and civil action) purposes, under proper Constitutionally mandated judicial review.
Oh, but wait: isn't the government STILL (now under the Obama Administration, and Dem. controlled Congress) claiming rights to this stuff (and more) without court review and order... How will that play into potential legislation and enforcement?
Note to Resident/Citizen Karl: Please, please drop the term 'consumer', if at all possible.
How about people, web or net-users, web surfers, shoppers, buyers, car shoppers, or what ever is most appropriate.
Unless one somehow remains a hunter-gatherer (living and foraging way off-grid, deep in what still may somehow have momentarily escaped progress/development), one is a 'consumer', hence everyone is a consumer, and so the word usually has no real meaning, other a reductive banding of as much possible human activity into commodification. This continual branding of as many citizens as 'consumers' (cattle heard members) acts itself to facilitate it's own acceptance. That protection/ advocacy groups use this term themselves is not very helpful.
While is can be said that anyone who surfs the web is 'consuming' bandwidth, power, 'content' ... , just as one could be termed in equally as vacuously manner an "air breather", by 'branding' all surfers as 'consumers' in the broader sense, one hastens this creeping (self) acceptance of one's existential purpose / (patriotic) duty being defined solely as an object of/for commodification.
This is, of course, the very goal of those who see the world this way, and their own "services' as indispensable aids to the betterment of humanity. |
