In the name of combating child pornography, US federal lawmakers are proposing that internet users' online surfing habits be retained for two years.
The so-called "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act of 2009," or SAFETY Act, was floated in both the House and Senate on Thursday.
Among other things, it demands: "A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user."
In short, if approved, everybody from employers to ISPs to coffee shops and universities would be required to keep logs of all data associated with IP addresses assigned randomly to individual users – from e-mail logins to search queries to sites visited, legal experts said.