Privacy Laws

[mars_army]

This may be the dumbest question ever, but I was thinking about it today and didn't quite know the answer.

First of all, I'm not even 100% as to whether song/file sharing is legal or not right now, but if there are people trying to crack down on sharers, can they get your information from, say, your ISP?

Say you're a Comcast subscriber, can Comcast simply monitor your surfing habbits? Watch you for torrent use? Monitor which programs you use to connect with, like Limewire and such?

It seems to me that if ISPs were able to do that, it'd cause a national crisis.

I'm fairly sure the answer is NO, companies can't do that. But with the way the country is leaning right now...doesn't it seem like a soon-to-be reality?

[nsane]

the answer is NO, they can't, a lady actually sued comcast for giving out her info (a violation of THEIR own contract...must think rules dont apply to them or something). but i haven't heard anything about their customers getting sued since...can't say that about other ISPs tho :\

my ISP, bellsouth, offers free newsgroups access tho. so i dont really need to worry about P2P crap, as 95% of my downloads from NGs (dunno if comcast offers binary group access tho) :rolleyes:

[mars_army]

Ahh, makes sense.

It's kind of scary though...that if the government wanted to..I mean REALLLLY wanted to...they could crack down, change some laws a bit and force everyone to come clean by getting the info from their ISPs or otherwise.

It would be ridiculous.

[nsane]

it'll never happen, it'd be like making your medical records public without a warrant or court order...and no one really believes the RIAA after all the b/s they've pulled lately (like the lady with no PC getting sued) :rolleyes:

...some judges are actually refusing to rule on P2P cases, lets just put it that way ;)