Challenges facing legislators in the digital age
The law constrains what computer scientists can do. Software constrains what lawyers and legislators can achieve when creating laws for the Internet. Laws made in one country are difficult to apply to the global internet whose content and algorithms include values from different societies and legal systems.
Personal information can be collected by companies online and sold to marketers in secrecy - without the consumers' knowledge or consent.
Cookies
Cookies are little pieces of data that inform a website when a particular user has returned. They allow shopping websites to keep a virtual shopping basket for a user, even when they leave the site. However, cookies are also used to track users across many websites and collect data used in ad targeting without the user's knowledge. UK law requires websites to get consent from users to use cookies.
Difficulties
It is hard for legislators to make decisions regarding the laws on computing, as often the ways data is used is subjective, and no factual decisions can be made regarding it. One of these issues is down to the fact that data can be used by companies without the consent of the user. Such companies often have intentions which only benefit themselves, but data can also be used in ways which benefit the user, or even vast amounts of people in the cases of disease tracking. Whether this kind of data usage should be banned is a hard decision for legislators, as the positive uses of the data can be beneficial to mankind, but this is drowned out by the selfish uses of the data by corporations.
Adding to the difficulty of legislation creation, country differences can cause issues, as some countries and cultures have different laws and opinions on the way data should be used. This means deciding who gets the final say in the matter is near impossible due to personal bias.
In addition, because companies are able to track your every move online, peoples' personal privacy is shrunk to almost nothing. This is considered by legislators to be an ethical problem, which is not easily solved through law.
Opinions
I strongly believe that no country should enforces its own laws on the internet due to cultural differences as no two countries share the same laws meaning a socially acceptable act in one part of the world will be illegal in another and if a single country held control over the internet, it would take freedom from diverse populations, with their own laws being nullified when on the best source of entertainment and news there is.
The law should at the most be restricted to the country that the individual accessed the internet in as it would allow each country's citizens to have their freedoms and it would be easier to enforce the law on the people in said country. this is a far better alternative as to letting one country to have dominion over the web, simply because it gives to much control to one place.
