EOC: Legal Issues involving the Internet

Legal Issues involving the Internet

There are a lot of problems and issues surrounding the Internet. One, Internet law is pretty new and they are a lot of questions and problems that haven’t been set yet. I am going to discuss Identity Theft, Online Gambling, and Privacy Laws

The first is issue which one of the biggest is Identify Theft. Identity theft is where a person gets information and poses as you to get money, credit, merchandise, and to use your identity to commit other crimes. To obtain the persons info that use cracking, or surveying.. Surveying is where the person guesses personal info about them. Simple questions like mother maiden name, pet names, or spouses to gain access on their username and passwords. There are better ways to protect your self, stronger passwords, cookies, look at your credit score periodically. The reason identity theft is hard because it can take a long time to figure out who stole your identity and they have to a full investigation to prove that someone stole your identity and it can take a lot of time to get your money your credit back, but surprisingly it is still safer to give out your credit card number on the internet then to give it to an unknown salesperson or waiter. 97% of all identity theft crimes are caused from offline instances, not online. For instance, two places that identity thieves get your information from are your mailbox, and your trash can. http://www.offthepagecreations.com/legal_issues_internet.php

The second issue is Online Gambling. Gambling online falls into a legal grey area. It illegal in most of the U.S. the prosecution and conviction of individual gamblers is hard to find because they are gambling from home. It is illegal for a gambling Web site to operate within the U.S. so that is why most online casinos are located in other countries. There are about 70 countries that have legal online gambling. The reason online gambling is hard to regulate because the US has gambling laws that are different from other countries laws. Because a person is gambling online they could be under age, or breaking some of the US gambling laws but it hard to tell that because they are at home. Issues of jurisdiction and sovereignty make gambling laws even murkier. The U.S. Wire Wager Act makes it illegal to use an electronic wire method (which courts generally agree includes the Internet) to transmit bets to places where gambling is not allowed. So a casino set up in the Netherlands is breaking U.S. law if a player in the U.S. plays their games. However, the U.S. doesn't really have the legal authority to prosecute someone in another country. Since players are almost never prosecuted either, we're left with an illegal act that generally goes unpunished. Of course, if an off-shore casino decides to cheat a player out of winnings, and online gambling is illegal in that player's locality, the player will have a difficult time suing the casino.  http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/online-gambling2.htm

The last issue is Privacy laws. Privacy laws are very difficult to track and are up for huge debate. With everything being mobile and the Internet is everywhere. On our phones, at work, at home, in our cars, and our tablet. Our Internet information is everywhere. The debate is how do we keep our smartphones and keep our core rights to privacy? Should we allow huge companies to obtain information about us without breaking privacy laws? How do you regulate that? First, the key is to include privacy and security from the very start while designing products and components. This way we can use technology without technology using us. Second, we already use firewalls and other approaches to limit who can reach our desktop computers. We could engineer similar technical intermediaries for our new devices. Third, privacy tools should be as simple to use as products themselves. Finally, it is rare for technology to entirely solve the challenges technology creates, so we need new privacy laws that are savvy and wise. There is much work to do, but we can build an awesome future without trading away our human need for privacy. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/09/08/privacy-and-the-internet-of-things/laws-can-ensure-privacy-in-the-internet-of-things. I think is hard to regulate. On personal experience I do like that some things have info on me because it is easy to look up things, but on the other hand how much personal info are they allowed to get with our breaking laws. I think this topic is going to be up for debate for a awhile and some of the laws regarding this topic will always be changing.