14 DAY TRIAL // Online privacy is a real issue, unfortunately, it's rarely analyzed properly. Minor things get blown out of proportion, yet non-obvious implications get ignored. Some Facebook setting showing your friends what you had for lunch will have half the internet up in arms, but the NSA spying on all Americans won't have anyone worried.
It is to be expected, technology has been evolving too fast for laws and people's perceptions and expectations to adjust. And when laws are put in place, they're almost always for the worse.
Rarely though, laws are proposed which would actually make things better. For example, one US senator is trying to push for an update on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act which has been around since 1986.
It's extremely out of date and it means that, at this point, authorities can request and receive access to your email rather easily, as long as it's stored in the cloud and not on your computer.
They need a warrant to look through your computer for data, but they don't need one to ask Google for access to your Gmail account. The proposed law would change that and would grant the same privacy protections to cloud-based email as messages stored on your computer.
Needless to say, most tech companies that offer email services, which would be pretty much everyone, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo etc. would approve of this legislation.
What is surprising, perhaps, is that law enforcement authorities support the bill as well. It makes sense though, currently, the confusion over what can and can't be accessed and on which conditions makes it harder for them to get the data they needed and harder for the companies providing the data to follow the rules. However, it remains to be seen whether the bill will gain any support where it counts, in Congress.