In response to Mac Diva’s comments to me about how I feel about internet privacy, she writes: T, I think you are giving yourself away as being like me — the sort of person who doesn’t do anything shady online. People who look at and/or download pornography or other potentially embarassing behaviors probably feel differently about privacy than we do.

I don’t see anything shady, embarassing or wrong with people downloading *LEGAL* adult material. Ok, I’ll grant that there are appropriate times to be viewing this type of material (in the privacy of one’s home, for example, and not at a library where others could be subjected to what’s on the screen).

In fact, I regularly do programming work for folks in the adult industry. Their money is good and I’ve learned that they are not all the stereotypical scumbags that mainstream media portrays them to be. Somewhere along the line sex as a business has gotten a bad rap. Sure, there are bad sex sites and operations, just like their are bad software sites (sites that promote hacked software, for example).

Legal is the big keyword in the paragraph above.

The problem is all the ILLEGAL adult material that proliferates and ends up in people’s caches. This really concerns me and accelerates the need for netizens to get themselves some sort of hard drive washing proggy which covers true purging of hard disk activity, especially if they surf legal adult entertainment sites. And just about everybody reading this, I’d wager, has at least accidentally visited a porn site.

However, for those who specifically search and seek out illegal material, well then I really hope they get caught and end up in jail where they belong and where they cannot be a threat to our children.

Now I make a distinction between mp3 downloading and seeking out kiddie porn as far as illegal material and content. There are degrees in most anything.

I don’t think downloading and sharing music as a hobby should be a criminal offense. I think if there is a commercial aspect to it then it is criminal and deserving of fines and possibly in an extreme case jail time. The RIAA has gone too far in what they are doing to the fans of music — way too far.

Now is it really the netizen’s fault if he/she surfs to a porn site and it pops a dozen windows and somewhere in one of those dozen windows (that he/she is trying to close as fast as they open if they aren’t popup-protected) someone links to someone who links to someone who links to some sick bastard that is promoting illegal activity.

This is one great reason to use popup blockers and that we all should hesistate on pronouncing guilt upon someone when a site URL that contains illegal material is cached in somebody’s browser as it is not a pure indicator that someone has illegal prurient interests in and of itself.

Hell, an image can be called from a site that is full of illegal activity and just because you visited site A doesn’t mean you should be responsible for what content is coming from site B — though the courts do not seem to be clear about this.

My point is there are limits as to where and how far privacy should go and a few cookies monitoring what I’ve bought on line from Company or Site A doesn’t hit my radar.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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