Senate Committee Approves Stricter Email Privacy 60
New submitter DJ Jones sent in good news in the attempts to update privacy rights for stored electronic communication. From the article: "The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved a bill that would strengthen privacy protection for e-mails by requiring law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant from a judge in most cases before gaining access to messages in individual accounts stored electronically. The bill is not expected to make it through Congress this year and will be the subject of negotiations next year with the Republican-led House."
The EFF seems pretty happy with the proposed changes, but notes that the bill also reduces the protections of the Video Privacy Protection Act in order to allow Netflix et al to sell your viewing history.
Re:I am okay with the Netflix change (Score:4, Informative)
Media distribution is a bit different from search engines, because it requires licensing deals for the content to distribute, which are often exclusive. It'd be one thing if Netflix and Company B both distributed all the major films, and you got to choose which platform you preferred based on criteria such as privacy, quality of the software, price, customer service, etc. But in practice the media business is all based around exclusive licensing deals, so for any given movie, you will be able to get it from Netflix, or from Company B, but will not have a choice of both. And what's likely is over the medium term one of those two will come out on top, as they collect all the good deals and drive the other one out of business.
There are possible ways to deal with it, mostly by laws against exclusivity deals or "tying", but in a market that allows tying you end up with those kinds of lack of perfect competition.