President Barack Obama signed legislation Thursday granting the public the right to automatically display on their Facebook feeds what they're watching on Netflix.
It's great news for those wanting to flood their Facebook feeds with whatever time-suck they're watching. But it's bad news for privacy. Lawmakers cut from the legislative package language requiring the authorities to get a warrant to read your e-mail or other data stored in the cloud.
What did sail through was the tinkering of the Video Privacy Protection Act, (.pdf) which had outlawed the disclosure of video rentals unless the consumer granted consent on a rental-by-rental basis. That prohibited Netflix customers from allowing their Facebook streams to automatically update with information about the movies they are viewing, though Spotify and other online music-streaming customers always could have consented to the automatic publication on Facebook of the songs to which they're listening.
Congress adopted the Video Privacy Protection Act in 1988 after failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's video rental history was published by the Washington City Paper during confirmation hearings.
A feature in the Senate's Netflix package -- sweeping digital privacy protections requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud -- was removed at the last minute despite passing the Senate Judiciary Committee in November.
Left in the dust were reforms to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The reform package, introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), would have nullified a provision that allows the government to acquire a suspect's e-mail or other stored content from an internet service provider without showing probable cause that a crime was committed.
Currently, the government can obtain e-mail or other cloud documents without a warrant as long as the content has been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more. The authorities only need to demonstrate, often via an administrative subpoena, that it has "reasonable grounds to believe" the information would be useful in an investigation.
Leahy has repeatedly sought to amend ECPA, but he finds little support for it among fellow lawmakers or with the Obama administration. So he pulled that feature from the Netflix legislation -- and it easily won the president's signature.
Look for the new Netflix sharing feature on Facebook soon. Look for reforms to ECPA when hell freezes over.
