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IP Address As Personal Information
By Dan Morrill
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-01-23
In some very interesting news coming out of the European Union, the IP Address that you use should be regarded as "personal information" meaning it now has the potential to fall under the safeguards and provisions of the very stringent privacy directives that the EU has.
This should be good for anyone who is doing anything on the Internet, from Bittorent and File Sharing to e-mail, surfing habits, and everything else that is done today. IP addresses, string of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday. Source: AP This should have a far reaching influence on search engines as well.
That means that every single log file that is generated by any form of server becomes "protected information" and has to be stored in accordance with EU privacy directives.
Storage, safety, and keeping these kinds of log files hacker safe, is going to be a very large undertaking.
The storage and security measures alone will consume people's cycles as they try to come to grips with the idea.
Google was firmly against the concept.
The biggest reason this is going to be hard, is that it is going to cost money, but also raises issues with computing in the cloud.
All that data people generate, has to be stored somehow, and kept safe.
Editor's Note: There is an interesting bit of commentary going on regarding the subject of this article in the comments. I encourage you to take part in the discussion.
Comments
About the Author:
Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.
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