Your privacy for sale
The companies Americans pay $40, $60, $80 or more a month to deliver a reliable home internet connection are getting free rein to sell their personal information without their permission. What makes this assault on privacy especially egregious: It is brought to you by the so-called party of individual freedom — via party-line votes in the Republican-controlled House and Senate, and, any day now, the signature of President Trump.
Last year, President Obama’s Federal Communications Commission passed new rules, set to go into effect later this year, requiring internet service providers to get customers’ permission before selling their browsing history on the open market.
That was based on the indisputable notion that the websites individuals visit add up to exceedingly sensitive information.
Disagree? List every site you’ve visited in the last week, right now.
But now, under pressure from Comcast, AT&T, Cox and other providers, Congress just shredded the rules. And banned the FCC from passing similar protections in the future.
Nor will the bill, almost certain to be signed into law by the President, even guarantee people’s right to affirmatively opt out of having this information fall into the hands of who knows whom.
The rationale for the sellout? The poor widdle internet giants say the new rules would have put them at a disadvantage to the likes of Google and Facebook, which track users’ behavior every which way, in the internet ad business.
But people can decide which of those free services to use — and can vigilantly guard against the tracking cookies they put on their machines.
Not so with internet providers. Americans pay for them, through the nose. A third of us have no choice in which company gives us broadband; another third have only two to choose from.
And unlike other tracking, which can be foiled with a little persistence, there’s basically no hiding from the prying eyes of these companies.
Switching into a browser’s private mode doesn’t help. The only way out is paying extra money for something called a VPN, or using cloaking technology like Tor. We didn’t think so.
Americans, who pay more and get worse internet service than subscribers in many other developed countries, are poised to lose a good measure of control over the lives they live online. As the man who’s about to enable the fleecing said repeatedly during the campaign, the game is rigged.