International Law

We've been writing about the Australian government -- mainly Stephen Conroy -- the politician who is actively trying to censor the internet, who is absolutely livid at Google, mainly because the company has accurately pointed out what a bad idea the censorship program would be. He's been making ridiculous and uninformed fear mongering statements about Google for a few weeks now. The latest, which is a blatant falsehood, is that Google's WiFi snarfing collected personal banking details. But, of course, as anyone who actually knows how these things work can tell you, banking sites use encryption. Google can only read unencrypted data, and all of the evidence suggests that Google discarded any encrypted info (not that it could do anything with it anyway).

Of course, while Conroy is grandstanding about how Google might have possibly, maybe collected a tiny snippet of unsecure info that passed through an open WiFi network while it was driving by -- saying that it was "the largest privacy breach in history across Western democracies," -- his government, in his area of regulation, is working on data retention plans that would require ISPs to spy on your internet usage. They don't just want ISPs to store your IP addresses. They want your browsing history and every email stored -- just in case the government wants to go back and check it some time.

That seems like a significantly bigger privacy breach than anything Google did.

via techdirt.com