LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
One Step Closer to Spyware Law
Posted by Rebecca Bolin on Monday, June 21 @ 16:28:52 EDT Privacy
A heavily modified version of Rep. Bono's spyware bill has made it through the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection. Its next step is the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The subcommittee has cleaned up this bill quite a bit. As predicted here at LawMeme, the awful acronym of SAPIA has been changed to include SPY. The new version is SPY ACT (Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass Act). Previous gaping definition problems have been replaced with more clear terms, and consent is defined explicitly ("This program will collect and transmit information about you and your computer use. Do you accept?’") and must be consented to with 'Yes' or 'No.' The program must also disclose what is being collected and for what purpose.

Bug or Feature? SPY ACT Act (maybe SAPIA was better) preempts state law related to misleading programs or installation, but not about fraud (hazy distinction here). It also exempts cookies explicitly, though the rest of the statute is careful not to be so wedded to current technology.

 
Related Links
· More about Privacy
· News by Rebecca Bolin


Most read story about Privacy:
Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Re: One Step Closer to Spyware Law (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Sunday, June 27 @ 16:29:54 EDT
How bad could it be? I mean, it has an attractive acronym. that means it must be good legislation.


[ Reply to This ]


Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
The PHP-Nuke engine on which LawMeme runs is copyright by PHP-Nuke, and is freely available under the GNU GPL.
Everything else is copyright copyright 2002-04 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php



Page Generation: 0.444 Seconds