I hope this doesn’t begin a battle on the discussion
of ‘privacy’ but I was wondering if anyone else has been following
this issue of ‘Phorm’ and privacy rights in the UK. Upon
reading today the details of requesting opt-out’s for specific domains, I
was considering discussing with my department whether requesting an opt-out of
scanning of our educational and non-profit sites would be a responsible thing
for us to do to protect the privacy and anonymity we are supposed to provide to
our users. Here are the finer details of the option:
Then, I started to wonder:
1)
If MSU has even considered an opt-out of it’s
top-level domain?
2)
If it would be against MSU’s privacy policies in
some way for me to do this opt-out for our domains?
3)
If there are other reasons it is a non-issue for us or
not in my interest to pursue?
I don’t think it’s a very good model overall,
certainly new ‘services’ of this type will continue now to crop up
across the globe and in the end it will take some sort of central ‘spamhaus’
type of service to manage a database of all of the global services and
notifications just to keep up. Also, from my understanding this would
only impact UK (or otherwise BT/Virgin/TalkTalk) customers who are trying to
access our websites from being then profiled by using our websites, which makes
it largely non-applicable to bulk traffic. Still…. Have other’s
had thoughts?
-
Joe
Joseph M. Deming
System Administrator
MATRIX/H-Net
415 Nat Sci Bldg
East Lansing, MI 48824
(517) 884-2472
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