Republicans just voted to roll back FCC privacy protections that would have prevented your internet service provider from selling your private browsing history.
After passing the Senate earlier in the week, the House approved a measure on Tuesday which would allow broadband providers like AT&T, Spectrum or Comcast to sell your online data to marketers (as well as corporate and government spies).
The vote in both chambers was split along party lines, with the GOP voting in favor of selling your porn habits to just about anyone who cares to pay for them, including maybe future employers. Naturally, many of these legislators were also the recipient of large donations from the telecommunications industry.
The vote freed ISPs of “protections approved just last year that had sought to limit what companies could do with information such as customer browsing habits, app usage history, location data and Social Security numbers,” according to Brian Fung of The Washington Post. The rules also mandated that ISPs offer their customers stronger protection against hackers.
Not only would the bill, which Pres. Donald Trump is expected to sign into law, roll back the privacy protections which were finalized in October 2016 and due to go into effect at the end of the year, it would also block the FCC from ever writing similar regulations again.
In a March 19 analysis, Jeremy Gillula, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, outlined “five creepy things” your ISP can do without these protections in place. In addition to selling your data to marketers, ISPs can hijack your search results to suit their (or advertisers’) whims, insert additional advertising into your online experience, or even slip secret tracking cookies into all your unencrypted web traffic.
BREAKING: The Gov’t Just Sold Your Internet Privacy To Corporations… Here’s How To Protect Yourself
March 29, 2017 By Kit O’Connell Republicans just voted to roll back FCC privacy protections that would have prevented your internet service provider from selling your private browsing history. After passing the Senate earlier in the week, the House approved a measure on Tuesday which would allow broadband providers like AT&T, Spectrum or Comcast to sell your online data to marketers (as well as corporate and government spies).
