Trump poised to kill rules on online privacy
The US House of Representatives passed a resolution on Tuesday reversing Barack Obama-era online privacy protections that imposed severe restrictions on what internet service providers could do with their data about their customers’ browsing behaviour.
The resolution was introduced and passed in the senate last week and now goes to President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign it into law, which many experts feared could lead to massive invasion of privacy and leave many Americans vulnerable to hackers and cyber attacks.
The vote went along party lines in line with Republicans’ view that the privacy protection rules, scheduled to kick in later this year, were throttling innovation and competition.
The legislative action, if enacted, will prevent the Federal Communications Commission, which framed the Obama-era protections, from revisiting the issue. The federal regulatory body’s newly appointed chairman Ajit Pai, an Indian American, welcomed the vote and promised to work with another federal regulatory body to protect consumers’ online privacy.
The new rules would enable Internet service providers such as Verizon, Comcast and AT&T, to mine information they had collected from the browsing activity of their consumers for highly targeted advertising, a $83 billion market currently dominated by Facebook and Google.
Or, they could sell that data to online advertising markets, financial companies and anyone else who can pay to use the information without the consent of consumers.