Every day more people are growing concerned over their right to privacy when it comes to the internet. What sites they go to, what they purchase as consumers (more on that in a bit) and what is said on social-sites can/are being monitored. In some extreme cases, people are required to hand over their passwords to sites such as Facebook through either school officials (12 year-old in Minnesota) or potential employers (growing trend). Internet service providers are often used by government officials to spy on or track person/s of interest. Recently, companies such as AT&T and Verizon have been caught handing over millions of user’s phone records over to the NSA (National Security Agency) while Verizon reportedly gave user data over to the FBI as well without a court-appointed warrant. This was done in 2006 and was made legal through a retroactive bill passed by the US Congress in 2008 (Patriot-Act part deux).
Not being comfortable with the idea of ‘Big Brother’ watching over our online habits, Nick Merrill (who founded Calyx Internet Access in 1994) is set to launch the non-profit ISP Calyx Institute which will provide customers with a secure-level of anonymity for the internet as well as mobile phone service for as low as $20 US a month. The users of Calyx will have end-to-end encrypted web-surfing along with encrypted E-mail services as well as a host of other services. This is of course if he gets the funding he needs ($2,000,000), featured on Indegogo (a kickstarter clone), to get it off the ground. (Combine this with the Hacker satellite, and here comes a budding free digital world.)
The other concern centers around the ever ambiguous ‘net neutrality’ issue which is designed to protect copywriters from having their wares pilfered on the web. Sure, no one wants their hard-earned ideas grifted by shady predators but sometimes this concept travels over to the absurd side of the tracks. For instance, Portugal’s PSP (Portugal Socialist Party) want’s to tax storage devices in the name of copyright protection thereby curbing piracy. This entails consumers to pay 0.2 Euros (or roughly $0.26 US) for every gigabyte of storage up to 1 terabyte ($28.00 US in taxes for 1TB) in capacity. It gets better; devices with a storage capacity of over 1TB are subjected to an aggravated tax of 2.5 cents Euro for each GB over 1 TB (adding an extra $51.2 Euros in taxes for a 2TB hard-drive). It doesn’t stop there as portable drives take the cake with devices over 1TB getting an additional 5 cents Euro per GB, which would make a portable drive with a capacity of 2TB taxed to the tune of a whopping $103.2 Euros. This insane tax initiative would effectively kill the storage industry in Portugal.
While officials say the ‘taxation measure’ would destroy their piracy problem, others suspect it may be designed to hold off a financial melt-down like that of Greece. While these two problems are ‘spun’ as a way to protect us from outside threats that could potentially hurt us, we may only need ‘sensible’ thinking in order to achieve the same result.
Cabe
