Do Private Websites Deserve Privacy Protection?
For years, technology has been mucking up the court system, by taking on laws that the technology makes obsolete. The problem gets even worse when judges and juries don’t understand the technology either, and make decisions that often make the situation worse. In the past, this has even resulted in calls for technology courts where judges would be required to have a core understanding of technology. The EFF is now getting involved in a case where a the right decision was made for the wrong reasons — potentially meaning that no website deserves any right to privacy, even password protected ones. In the case in question, a critic of a company wrote on his website that representatives from that company were not allowed to enter his publicly accessible site. People from the company did view it and so he sued. The court looked at the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and freaked out thinking that he might have a case. It all hinged on the definition of “storage.” In the end, the
