Fergie's Tech Blog

EFF Victory: New Decision Protects Privacy of Password-Protected Websites

Via The EFF.

Today, the Eleventh Circuit's issued a decision in Snow v. DirecTV and preserved the legal protections for actually private websites while protecting your right to read public websites. EFF had filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting this ruling.

The case involved a lawsuit against DirecTV for accessing the public website of anti-DirecTV activists run by plaintiff Michael Snow. The website had a banner and purported Terms of Service forbidding DirecTV representatives from entering the site or using its message board, but it was configured such that anyone in the public could enter the site, create a profile, and use the board.

The lower court had rightly dismissed the case, but for the wrong reasons. It held that the "Stored Communications Act" portion of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 did not protect websites at all, even if they were configured to be private. It reached this privacy-destroying decision because DirecTV's lawyers had failed to make the better argument: that web sites *are* protected by the Stored Communications Act (or "SCA"), *except* when they are configured to be readily accessible to the general public.

posted by Fergie @ 6/01/2006 02:44:00 PM