As the world of technology drives forward, concerns over our privacy are ever-increasing. Today brings a rather interesting new point in the debate, as federal judge has ruled that peer-to-peer file sharing is not a private matter.
The case, held in Vermont, was surrounding the detection of child pornography. The defendants in the case argued that police officers had obtained files illegally, a claim that the judge threw out. Police found the files using the Child Protection System, which features a number of software tools to help locate these files.
District Court Judge Christina Reiss ruled that since the files were shared to a P2P (peer-to-peer) network, they were no longer private.
“The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the only information accessed was made publicly available by the IP address or the software it was using,” Reiss says. “Accordingly, either intentionally or inadvertently, through the use of peer-to-peer file sharing software, Defendants exposed to the public the information they now claim was private.”
It’s not the specific case so much as the general ruling that makes this story so important. In a context outside of this atrocious crimes, are we really risking our privacy when sharing files from peer-to-peer?
Source: Computer World
