Canadian bill to crack down on illegal downloads has privacy experts worried
I wonder what the broader implications are of this bill. Is the bill broad enough that if I detect an IP address connect to my business SSH server does that afford me the privilege to obtain the customer information from the IP address?<p>Think about that for a moment, as a business owner I can now send a request to any ISP that owns an IP address that connected to my website. Why do I need your customer information, why because I did not authorize the IP access to /index.html, and the IP address showed repeated attempts connecting and using my computer resources (of course to the ISP I make it sound a little more sinister, like embed an image tag to a resource like /employee-portal/login so that I can tell the ISP the unauthorized access was to the employee portal, and of course that image tag will result in generating requests in my server logs to show the repeated requests from the IP trying to fetch that resource. Poof now I have the name and phone number for everyone that has been to my business website and is potentially interested in what I'm selling.. Of course, I won't tell the individual how I got their phone number. I wouldn't practice this, but for a morally corrupt business it sounds viable.<p>If the above is possible by the bill, and from the articles that I've read it is, then this bill strikes me as particularly stupid legislation bought for by moneyed interests. I can only hope that our government isn't so corrupted by those moneyed interests that this thing passes.