Mashable, a news site that features lots of tech stories, recently posted an article about 7 tech laws that were passed in 2013. While some of them are less significant than others it is good to see that tech laws are on the forefront of some representatives minds.
The first one they mentioned deals with police having to get warrants to search your email. In the article it says that many people believe this to be dated. However, I think it's fantastic. It should of been a law for quite sometime, and while it had originally covered only email 180 days old and earlier it now ranges back 6 months. Although with all the news that has come out on the NSA and Prism I doubt a search warrant will do any American much good anymore....
The next one has to do with cellphone location. This one was passed in California and it makes it so that cops are required to once again get a search warrant before they can access cell phone location data. This one also seems good on paper to me, because it protects our rights as it should. However as I said for the previous one, with the NSA it may not even matter anymore.
I am going to skip over number 3 and go straight for number 4 as number 4 is a little more relevant to what I am talking about. Unlocking cell phones has been a big deal for quite some time. It has always been illegal to unlock cell phones but over the past couple of years they made unlocking cell phones and exception to the rule and merely left the out of the law that said it was illegal. However this year they decided to not do that again and it is now completely illegal to do it. Sometimes you got to take a step back before you can move forward, so hopefully we will get it together and make it legal to unlock your phone again in 2014. One can dream right?
Number 5, is an interesting one because it involves FB likes and your first amendment right to Freedom of Speech. This means that liking something on Facebook is now protected by the First Amendment, because why not I guess?
Number 6 will be great for all of you business oriented people. You may now keep your phone on through out your flight as long as it is in airplane mode. I actually got to experience this new phenomenon when I went to Florida for Thanksgiving. I still ended up turning my phone off...I guess some habits die hard.
If you want to read about them and what Mashable has to say the link is below. Hopefully we will see things like being able to copy DVD's to your hard drive for personal use in 2014 and other such laws passed. Keep on trucking America, technology is here to help so let it!
Biggest Tech Laws of 2013
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