They are repealing a Obama rule ensuring that your online data was safe. Now, I detested Obama as much as everybody.. but wtf?
ISP's will now be allowed to capture all internet traffic to and from your house and sell it off if they care to. Emails? Yep. Texts if your phone hooks up to WiFi? Yep. Everything you buy on Amazon? Yep. Everything you post here? Oh yeah.
List of all banks, credit card companies, online stock trading companies, retirement accounts, etc? Yep. Hope you've never been a victim of identity theft, because combine these and your SSN and you might be living your retirement years in your kid's basement.
Passed purely along party lines, every Republican voting to remove your online privacy rights, every Democrat voting to protect them.
I'm at a loss here. I can't begin to fathom why anybody would have thought this was a good idea.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/28/congress_approves_sale_of_internet_histories/The US House of Representatives has just approved a "congressional disapproval" vote of privacy rules, which gives your ISP the right to sell your internet history to the highest bidder.
The measure passed by 215 votes to 205.
This follows the same vote in the Senate last week. Just prior to the vote, a White House spokesman said the president supported the bill, meaning that the decision will soon become law.
This approval means that whoever you pay to provide you with internet access – Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, etc – will be able to sell everything they know about your use of the internet to third parties without requiring your approval and without even informing you.
Your ISP already knows quite a lot about you: your name and address, quite possibly your age, and a host of other personally identifiable information such as your social security number. That's on the customer information side. On the service side, they know which websites you visit, when, and how often.
That information can be used to build a very detailed picture of who you are: what your political and sexual leanings are; whether you have kids; when you are at home; whether you have any medical conditions; and so on – a thousand different data points that, if they have sufficient value to companies willing to pay for them, will soon be traded without your knowledge.
As one high-profile venture capitalist recently discovered, your previous search history can also impact what result you see in future. Although in his case, he probably wishes he hadn't publicly criticized Apple on Twitter for giving him the details of a porn actress at the top of his search results.
The precise user profiles that can be built using this data are worth their weight in gold to advertisers, and explains why Google and Facebook are two of the world's largest companies despite only being a search facility and an online noticeboard.
