Japan's new privacy bill

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: IKEDA Nobuo <ikeda-nobuo () rieti go jp>
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2003 02:49:25 +0900
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: ikeda-nobuo () rieti go jp
Subject: Re: [IP] Japan's new privacy bill

This is a correction.

Last week we released an appeal to oppose the new privacy bill because
"administrative punishment would be imposed on a Web site operator".
We were wrong. This week, during the discussion in the Diet, IT minister
admitted that USERS of the Internet and car navigation systems could be
punished if the law is literally interpreted.

Indeed, since WWW is an open distributed database, every user of Web is
a "database operator". Naturally opposition parties got angry and the
government is ready to amend this defective bill. But this funny event
shows that it is absurd to regulate databases in the age of the Internet.

--
Ikeda, Nobuo
Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI)
http://www.rieti.go.jp/en/

------ End of Forwarded Message

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