Privacy and Identity Theft

TorrentSpy, a popular BitTorrent search engine, was ordered on May 29 by a federal judge in the Central District of California in Los Angeles to create logs detailing users’ activities on the site.

It is quite common for judges to order websites to preserve evidence, ie. logfiles of user activity and IP addresses. However, this is judge is attempting to force a defendant to change their logging procedures, in violation of their stated privacy policy. TorrentSpy does not keep logs of user activity (yet). Should this order be enforced, it could really impact overall privacy on the Net, especially if coupled with gag orders, thereby preventing sites from informing users about the required logging.

Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation said: “In general, a defendant is not required to create new records to hand over in discovery. We shouldn’t let Web site logging policies be set by litigation.”

TorrentSpy is hosted in Spain, and so it will be difficult for a California judge to enforce the order. A TorrentSpy lawyer suggested that they may just ban U.S. IP addresses from accessing the service.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.