The National Post reports that Facebook has asked a Canadian court to order Rogers and Look Communications to disclose customer information related to alleged attempted thefts of personal information on the social networking site.
Facebook Seeks Court Order For Canadian ISP Customer Info
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Scary
This is a somewhat frightening prospect, and if allowed to go through, would set a dangerous precedent.
While I don’t condone identity theft in any way, I’m also of the mind that tracking hackers, law-breakers, etc through an IP address is not a good practice. Tracking them down by IP address only tells them what *machine* did the work, and not necessarily what user did it. Were they zombie machines? Or perhaps the IP addresses were spoofed. As the RIAA has found out time and again in their crusade against file sharing in the states, an IP address is a shaky piece of evidence at best, and even if Rogers and Look *did* bow to the pressure, or if they were forced by court order, theres no guarantee that the owner of the account that held the IP is actually the hacker that did the job.
Its unfortunate that with technology as it is right now, there’s no real concrete way to track the perpetrators of such crimes.
To Facebook, I say good luck, but I would be very surprised to see a conviction out of this.
Recently someone accessed my Facebook account without authorization. I made a request to Facebook that they send me a list of login attempts to my account so that I might have the IP addresses of the individuals who were accessing it. They refused, saying that they would require a court order in order to meet my request.
It seems odd they would expect an ISP to do something they themselves are not willing to do.