Towards the end of February a new copyright alert system had rolled out. Essentially it is an early alert system for users that downloaded illegal/copyright content. The individuals affected by this new monitoring system are those who download from peer to peer clients. The most popular client out there are torrents. So if one day John doe decided to download the new Taylor Swift album from The Pirate Bay and the content owners of that album (ex: the recording studio) happened to find out that this file was downloaded illegal through a peer to peer network, the content owners can inform the Internet Service Provider of the downloaders’ illegal activity and the Internet Service Provider (ex: Verizon) will send our a warning to user in the form of a pop up message and an email notification.
The rest of the article talks about the other repercussions that could occur if the user repeatedly downloads (pirates) copyrighted content.
While Internet Service Providers have been monitoring our online usage since the dawn of time, now they are seemingly passing this ability to content owners (music/movie industries). These content owners essentially could be monitoring everything that we download, since they are screening out all of the downloads and transfers that occur through peer to peer networks. Could this lead to an invasion of our privacy? They basically have the tools needed in order to analyze our behaviors on the internet, and with the support of the major internet service providers, its as though they are free to roam around in our private lives as they so desire. Torrenter’s are not the only ones affected, even users that send files through 4shared and FileZilla are monitored since those fall in the category of P2P. What do you think? Do you think there is a much greater transparency on the net now and that we should be held accountable/responsible for our behavior on the internet? And do you think it is “fair” that these content managers are able to monitor our behavior (whatever it may be they are actually really monitoring)?
Source:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2013/0227/Copyright-Alert-System-Six-strikes-and-you-re-out
I do not think that our personal behavior on the web should be monitored, but then again it may be in everyone’s best interest for some surveillance. If content owners like record companies felt that they’re rights were always being infringed upon, they may stop creating music, increase the price, or make it more difficult to access music. So surveillance is necessary. But then, how do you say or even know when enough is enough. I agree with the point that was made that we don’t know if they’re only looking for illegal music downloads. I personally believe they can see more than just that. In this day in age, everyone is caught up with finding out about you so they know how to sell you stuff. So the question is what, if anything can we do to protect our privacy? And can we do anything at all or are we at the mercy of the content owners and Internet Service providers.
To concur with what Camille mentioned, i think it is fair that content managers can monitor our behavior online when it comes down to illegal downloads. As of looking into our internal behaviors online, i don’t think that they should be able to see what we do from a day to day basis if we aren’t doing anything wrong. That would be a breach of privacy.