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Proposed Data Protection Laws: Major Concerns for Webmasters

Our esteemed leaders in the U.S. Congress are vowing to enact new laws targeting data thieves, backup-tape burglars and other information-age miscreants. We should be worried. . Any reasonable person, of course, should agree that such thefts must be punished and data warehouses should let us know if our information falls into the hands of criminals. But a bill announced last week by Sens. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., goes far beyond reasonable data security precautions. It amounts to a crackdown on individuals, bloggers and legitimate e-mail list moderators. Anyone who runs a Web site with registered users and receives income from it (Blogads and Google Ads count) should be concerned. The Specter-Leahy bill says that if that site's list of user IDs or e-mail addresses is compromised, each registered user must be notified via U.S. mail or telephone. Refusal to do so can be punished with $55,000-a-day fines and prison time of up to five years. That's remarkable but not as extreme as the second requirement: The Web master or mailing list operator might have to "cover the cost" of 12 monthly credit reports of each person whose e-mail addresses was lost or purloined. For a popular site with 10,000 registered users, that would be a princely sum. If monthly credit reports cost $15 a person, that's $1.8 million over a year.. Any reasonable person, of course, should agree that such thefts must be punished and data warehouses. esteemed, leaders, congress, vowing, enact, targeting, thieves, backu. . Brittany Day

Jul 05, 2005 • Brittany Day Government