Opinion

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Privacy

Tuesday 16 October 2007

Good to see that the privacy watchdog CBP has our best interests at heart in its efforts to protect our personal details on the internet.

No longer will we have to fear that a jealous ex will scatter details about our bad habits on jealousex.com forums or that photos of drunken dancing at the works barbecue will end up on file-sharing websites.

A swift email to the webmaster and the offending material will be whipped away, faster than you can say YouTube. Fat chance.

There is a charming naivity about so much of officialdom’s efforts to bring in legislation to police the internet. Not so long ago, social affairs minister Piet Hein Donner had the great idea of banning people from using assumed names on the internet.

Obviously not a great player of online games or user of discussion forums, Donner had apparently no idea that the internet thrives on fake identities.

And so, while it is most considerate of the privacy watchdog to help us get information removed from the internet, you have to ask if drunkenbarbie.com will actually pay any attention when asked to remove the offending photo.

We can’t even get child pornography and racial hate sites off the internet. And that, surely, should be a far higher priority for Mr Donner and chums than Mike from accounts’ embarrasing karaoke moment.