Bill Would Extend DMCA-Style Takedowns To 'Personal Info'

Privacy

from the this-won't-end-well dept

There are certainly concerns from many people about the fact that it’s difficult to get certain information to go away online. Hell, there’s an entire industry built around the idea of trying to either remove or hide any “bad info” about you online. However, it looks like there’s a new bill in Congress that would be a disaster for free speech and would have incredible unintended consequences. It’s an attempt to extend DMCA-style takedowns for any “personal info” posted online. This comes just as more people are recognizing that such takedowns have a high likelihood of being unconstitutional. In this case, the so-called “Cyber Privacy Act” would require any website that allows open posting of content to provide “a means for individuals whose personal information it contains to request the removal of such information” and would then be required to “promptly remove the personal information of any individual who requests its removal.”

Notice that there is no other option. You can’t respond as to why that content is reasonable and should be left available. You can’t defend basic freedom of speech. In fact, this is even worse than a DMCA-style notice-and-takedown regime, which at least has a process of counternotices and the allowance that content can be put back up under certain conditions. That does not exist in this case. And what constitutes “personal information”? According to the bill:

As used in this Act, the term ‘personal information’ means any information about an individual that includes, at minimum, the individual’s name together with either a telephone number of such individual or an address of such individual.

The bill was introduced by Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, and it seems like one of those bills that someone rushed out after hearing some moral panic about people’s information being online. But it looks like Rep. McCotter never bothered to think through the unintended consequences of making it easy to demand content be taken offline with no recourse. In many cases, things like your name, address or telephone number are, in fact, public information — and even if you don’t like that such content is out there, it doesn’t mean that it should be illegal. It’s not hard to see how this would be massively abused, just like the DMCA takedown process and create a pretty big burden for all sorts of websites. About the only “good” thing I could see if this bill passed is perhaps we’d get a precedent that could be used to invalidate the DMCA’s takedown process as unconstitutional as well.

Filed Under: cyber-privacy act, moral panic