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The "Digital Economy Bill" has been passed by the Lords and is now expected to be rushed through the Commons before the general elections. Despite criticism by the UK's major telecommunication providers and global internet giants like Google, the government said it was still committed to giving courts the power to block websites which are infringing copyright. The bill is mainly aiming to tackle internet privacy. Some of it's paragraphs however could lead to internet censorship.

This article discusses the rhetorical question of how the Internet culture of youths, does not have laws that adequately serve or protect. Some laws are too concrete, while others are non existent. Laws need to be redefined, as the Internet culture does not necessarily dictate the same types of culture and attitudes we experience in person. The laws at present, provide loopholes, that either are not justified persecutions, or are simply to harsh, and or simply allow the offender to walk away.

The internet: a land without "social or cultural or primitive race memory". What are the implications when entire generations voluntarily forfeit their right to privacy?

This article discusses who is held resposible for cyberbullying. Three executives from Google have been convicted of privacy violation, and have been accused of not acting swiftly enough to take down an online video of an autistic boy being beating by teen bullies. There are many issues that arise from this topic, for example, how far does accountability stretch, does it stem from the original poster, to the Internet Service Provider, the company hosting the content.It brings to question who do we hold responsible, and under which jurisdiction and set of laws do we use. Should there be a screening process to prevent such videos from being posted online?

GoDaddy.com, the world's largest domain name registration company is taking similar action to Google by deciding to not conduct further business in China. This decision is a reaction to China now demanding that applicants of domain names are to provide additional personal information, including a full colour head shot photograph. While China maintains forcing applicants to register extensive personal information will curb the creation of unsavoury sites (namely pornography) everyone else outside of the Chinese government believes such detailed personal information will equip the government to target any individual (to what extent - who knows) displaying any content that the government does not support. Is this an invasion of privacy? Should people be able to exercise multiple personas on the internet, or should you be who you are? If a government is to collect such information who will ensure the information it collects isn't abused? Do we answer these questions differently when thinking of China i.e. what would the answers be if Australia was to introduce such a law? At the very least, it's a relief to see companies realising that China is compromising the values of the internet and are reacting suitably by taking their services out of the country. More need to participate in the retalliation.

Ahhhh location applications....the possibilities, the privacy issues. Why wouldn't everyone want their GPS location displayed as public record? A good explanation of why only 7% of Americans are currently using location aps. The important things for consumers to know would be who could access their data and for what purposes. Not only who and for what purpose but another question for consideration is who would have policing authority over the data.

Amendments made to the digital economy bill last week, handing courts the power to force internet service providers (ISPs) to block certain websites, threaten freedom of speech and will lead to British websites being blocked without due judicial process, the chief executives of leading technology companies said in an open letter to the Financial Times. The heads of the four largest UK internet service providers as well as Google, Facebook, eBay and Yahoo have all co-signed the letter, along with consumer groups and academics, objecting to amendment. Theoretically the amendment could lead to sites such as YouTube being blocked in the UK.

This article discusses how Michael McConnell (former director of national intelligence), has suggessted that "we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment - who did it, from where, why and what was the result - more manageable." Under the guise of protecting the state, it deems the "netizens," as possible enemies of the state.

International Journal of Internet Protocol Technology (IJIPT)

Cloud to take up 90% of IoT data by 2020, says IDC. IDC's FutureScape report reveals the latest findings and predictions on the Internet of Things (IoT) between 2015 and 2020. CBR highlights 10 need-to-know predictions from the report's findings. 1.

Google thought they were jumping on the social networking bandwagon with this but it seems to have backfired! Talks of privacy issues puts google in a bad position with their users.

An insightful episode- which speaks about the cyber-crime/espionage and privacy issues which have been linked back to China.

What happens when an institution that is supposed to be safe, violates your personal rights? This article discusses how a high school in Philadelphia installed software on their lap tops that would capture photos of the user of the lap top. Though the software was intended for recovery measures of stolen lap tops, it appears that the software goes beyond photos taken from the software contained images of chats, and content that the user was viewing, to the users themselves dressing., as it spies upon the user's interactions with peers. This brings to question whether or not to trust institutional technology, and whether or not they should stipulate that some software installed may violate the users right to privacy.

Letter to Google from the Canadian government regarding their concerns about Google's disregard for privacy standards when joining GMail to the social network - Google Buzz.

Google has released the extent to which intruders broke into their system in January. It targeted their password system which controls access to users worldwide. This brings up the debate about the security and privacy of systems like Google that centralize personal information. However, the real issue behind this attack was that it was traced to two computers in China which then started the whole 'Google to change its policy toward China'.

The search giant has hit back at state requests (or court orders) to censor content on YouTube or in Google search by releasing a map showing the number of requests for censorship by country. Google has stated this move is "part of its continuing championing of openness of information" and insists the timing is purely coincidental regarding the complaint from 10 nations that Google releases new products without due consideration for privacy implications (as posted by Liz Gan), Reading the comments in these articles is always insightful. Someone points out that a lot of the requests may simply relate to slanderous items requested by courts to be removed (rather than evil government censorship requests).

Are we using facebook or is facebook using us?

Collecting web data, who is it helping and who is it hurting. Google Analytics is a prominent free to use service that allows everyone from micro bloggers to corporations to record the statistics for visitors to their sites. Analytics can tell you where visitors are from, what they searched for, and what time they visited. They receive this information from your IP address, and ultimately your visit could potentially be traced directly back to your comptuer. Google has created an add-on to help hid your IP address identity, in a likely effort to protect the company from privacy concerns.

Privacy may not be completely dead with Google promising a broader future roll out of an SSL encrypted Google search meaning companies will not be able to track where traffic to a site comes from...