At 07:45 AM 05/02/2001 -0700, David Honig wrote:
>Yeah but is there a (contract etc.) *law* being broken or is this a
>legally-null claim? After all, if click-through EULAs are legally binding...
Maybe a real lawyer could tell you. The answer may depend on whether
there's valuable consideration exchanged, and viewing banner ads
probably doesn't count (especially since the banner ads typically
come from banner ad companies who aren't giving you any
promises of keeping your information private.)
While occasionally there may be a web site deliberately lying
about whether they're keeping logs "No, we won't sell your
information to spammers!", a more likely scenario is
- web site content provider isn't keeping logs of content access
but they're using a shared hosting service.
- web hosting provider is keeping logs for technical support,
debugging, problem resolution, etc.
- banner ad vendor keeps everything they can get
- web site's ISP keeps logs of connections (e.g. IP addresses and
TCP port numbers, but not content of communications.)
>Actually, many corps have explicitly decided to shred their email after a
>while.
>You can thank Ollie North & the MS judges for cluing in the public. So the
>corp counsels are actively blowing off the suggestion you're claiming.
A long time ago, in a phone company far, far away, we had incredibly
detailed sets of requirements for record-keeping because of the
regulatory environment. My wife had a summer job in college translating
one database from a hand-rolled mostly-undocumented format into
a (then-)current commercial database system so they could get the data
just in case they got sued about it - something along the lines of
promptness or pricing of wholesale telecom services in PacBellLand.
Of course, the commercially available database also rotted into
technical obsolescence after a few years, but by then nobody'd sued them
about it in enough years that there was no need to preserve it longer.
