Bill H.B. 2288 aims to track Hawaiian web surfers

Oahu Republican Kymberly Pine is under attack for proposing controversial bill (PDF) that would track the web movement of all Internet users in Hawaii. Pine now claimed that the measure is meant to protect victims of crime, not to see what every citizen or visitor visits on the web. Civil liberty advocates and industry representatives have criticized the proposed legislation.

The bill was heard and tabled by the Hawaii House of Representatives. It will also probably be revised, with Pine herself admitting compiling dossiers "was a little broad." The bill, H.B. 2288, was called "a direct assault on bedrock privacy principles" by Laure Temple, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii. Good privacy practices include deleting data that's not needed rather than compiling it, the ACLU added. H.B. 2288 would keep data on file for two years. Other Internet-related associations have said the data could be misused in lawsuits and be very expensive to put in place.

Representatives for the city of Honolulu, however, have their own counterpoints. Larger ISPs already keep service records of a user's content, wrote Christopher Van Marter, the city's senior deputy prosecuting attorney.

The proposed bill also makes no restrictions on what ISPs can do with the information, including selling it to advertisers. Whether the police would need to obtain a court order for the information is also not specified. The use of encryption for the files also hasn't been detailed. [via CNET]

By Electronista Staff