Senate votes to let ISPs sell your Web browsing history to advertisers
ISP now stands for “invading subscriber privacy,” Democratic senator says.
The vote passed along party lines, 50 (R) for and 48 (D) against. The policy, originally proposed by then acting FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler outlined clear guidelines for how ISPs were to handle your data. In short, they couldn’t use it without your permission and they certainly weren’t able to share sensitive information like browsing history and location data with advertisers.
If the resolution is successful, your internet provider will be able to track where you go online, what you look at, and a host of other things, and then sell that information to other companies — and they won't need to ask for your permission or notify that they are doing this.
Worse, the ruling could put the FCC in danger of not being able to create similar ones in the future. According to the Congressional Review Act:
"Once a rule is thus repealed, the CRA also prohibits the reissuing of the rule in substantially the same form or the issuing of a new rule that is substantially the same, “unless the reissued or new rule is specifically authorized by a law enacted after the date of the joint resolution disapproving the original rule."
If you’re wondering how we got here, follow the money: the 22 Republican senators behind the push to strike down the original ruling have pocketed more than $1.7 million from telecom companies since the 2012 election.
Up next is the House of Representatives, where it’s expected to get the needed number of votes thanks to a Republican-controlled House voting along party lines, and finally Trump’s desk. He’s expected to sign the bill.
CALL, FAX, WRITE your reps and demand that they oppose letting this happen.
* Find your Representative: http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
* Use the EFF's https://democracy.io/ site to find them and email them for you
* Use https://resistbot.io/ to turn text messages into fax's to your representatives
So all the FBI have to do is say they want to sell ads and they get the browser data without a warrant.
And so starts the era of everyone and their grandmother using high encryption methods.
+Runivis Roan: encryption doesn't do anything to hide metadata, unfortunately: they still know what websites you're visiting and which pages you're reading. We need something a lot more technically demanding to obscure that information, like tor.
+John Bump I suppose now we all need our on VPN servers with 0 logging. Ugh.
And as I was on about elsewhere, how long until our ISP's charge us huge amounts extra for encrypted packets that they can't scan for data they can sell elsewhere?