Your internet history on sale to highest bidder: US Congress votes to shred ISP privacy rules 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 …
Does anyone not believe that ISPs are selling your info anyway?
The Google Rule: Once a company has your private information, they will ignore laws and EULAs and sell it anyway.
This should be a Ferengi Rule of Acquisition.
That's been proven again and again. Doesn't make it right. Me, I'm looking to use a VPN from home from now on.
It's always been the case under EU data protection that your data can't safely pass through the US anyway. This is why Facebook et al set up EU data centres and refuse requests from US authorities to just pass on information.
The Internet, from your ISP onwards, is still - and always has been - an untrusted connection. If you're transmitting things in plain-text through it, even to next-door, then you're at risk of your traffic being snooped and need to protect, encrypt, VPN, etc.
This won't make any difference to that.
However, I do love the irony of all those years of having US people accuse the UK of playing "Big Brother" when in reality they are years ahead of us in that regard.
"... whether you have any medical conditions; and so on ..."
Any time I read about or hear about some medical condition, I read about it on Wikipedia (and other sites) and follow any interesting looking links. If a similar law passes in the UK, they'll send a medical SWAT team round to my house to seal it off and isolate me.
It may be time to start using a VPN more often. The Opera browser has a free one built in to it.
Note: My ISP (Virgin Media), along with others I'm sure, has the ability to inject their own tab into my browser session to show me anything they want. They have used this technique in the past to nag me about selecting a service option. I would not be surprised if the ISPs themselves started injecting adverts into their customer's browsers in this and other ways.
If a similar law passes in the UK, they'll send a medical SWAT team round to my house to seal it off and isolate me.
Don't forget under RIPA and DRIPA, GCHQ already have access to this. As we've repeatedly seen this additional hay doesn't help them find the needles. My wife works in child and adult safeguarding, and the sort of things she searches on from our home computer, well, you don't want to know, and you REALLY wouldn't choose to have logged. But after some years in this difficult line of work, we've not had any knocks at the door.
Which either means they're (a) clever enough to properly discriminate different types of search, or (b) they're utterly swamped, and utterly hopeless. My money is on b.
"Which either means they're (a) clever enough to properly discriminate different types of search, or (b) they're utterly swamped, and utterly hopeless. My money is on b."
It's option C - you are known about but are not important enough to the authorities to threaten or jail you. Yet.
I can see fun to be had here - go to a neighbours, borrow their wireless and search for lots of random things, then see what the marketeers make of that. The real people who buy the Internet connection then get lots of random and probably inappropriate things marketed to them. This then causes awkward conversations when people try to explain the marketing offers to their other halves ..
Same for the kids browsing when the parents get things marketed to them or vice-versa.
Like many things with a trump badge, its really not thought through is it
On a similar note, but unrelated to ISPs, a friend of mine outlined a prank where a group of people injected white text with strange phrases into their emails to a friend's Gmail account. The target was somewhat puzzled by the subsequent appearance of numerous adverts for goat-related products after this
You raise an interesting point. How granular will this be? House level? Computer level? We have 4 computers networked via router. So when this data gets pasted to the marketers (and probably miscreants, etc. via "purchase of the data" which computer will get tagged? All?
Oh the fun and games are starting....
What a ridiculous law! If this had been in the headlines sooner there would have been time to co-ordinate a legal protest in the public interest. I can't see how anyone representing the public could have passed such an obtrusive law - our internet history should be considered private information except what you choose to share.
What's to stop someone buying this data and publishing it for all to see? If everyone could see their neighbour's internet history that would surely wake people up to demand their privacy. Any ISP that promises not to share your internet history without charging a premium will corner the market. But I guess not everyone has a choice of ISP.
Ah, thanks for enlightening us. I was expecting some kind of rant from Breitbart, but it's all very clear.
The gist, cited about 3-4 times, just in case you were wondering how the heck your lawmakers were looking after your interests:
>The FCC will soon return broadband privacy policing to the Federal Trade Commission, where it belongs, like all online privacy.
So, this is NOT about Americans' privacy getting sold out at all. It's about fixing a regrettable bureaucratic turf war.
The FTC, rather than the FCC, will now soon step in and prevent ISPs from selling on your browser history for no discernible purpose other than making some extra $$$. Poor ISP companies, spending all that dosh wining and dining pols, just to have re-lobby all over again at the FTC.
Thanks for clearing that up.
> Did you seriously read and now you are quoting a Breitbart article?
I originally downvoted him, but the bit about his mostly agreeing with El Reg clued me in that he's likely just quoting Breibart.
Which is very appropriate, IMHO. It pays to understand what kinda Doublespeak is being used to sell something which has _no_ tangible benefits to the affected people at all.
If you take The Wall, or The Muslim Ban, then though misguided, they at least pander to the prejudices of the core Trump supporters. Ditto increased police snoopiness laws.
Did those Trump supporters realize Washington was going to allow large telecoms (often monopolistic in rural areas) increased leeway to invade their privacy, without upside whatsoever? I guess they didn't and with helpful newsites like Breitbart they are still dupes.
From El Reg:
"How are consumers protected? According to Flake, by not having their ability to receive information about "innovative and cost-saving product offerings" limited."
You can't make this stuff up.
Now, do you think that the legislators who voted for this will finally confront the depth of their moral vacuity when:
a) the inevitable hack occurs
b) the inappropriate/embarassing ad pops up on the home computer
c) what's that? I can't hear you from behind this pile of money
Since too much regulation is bad, which is a quite reasonable position to take, by extension they decided all regulation is bad. Because some providers governed by different regulations didn't have to protect your privacy, the solution was seen as "remove privacy protections from all providers". The option of "impose privacy protections equally for all providers" didn't occur to them, because it would mean adding regulation, which is automatically bad.
If there was a lot of competition amongst ISPs this wouldn't really matter, you could choose one that makes a commitment not to sell your information. Unfortunately most people have only two choices, their cable provider and telco provider, and in some cases the second choice is pretty slow so it is effectively a monopoly in their area. What's their choice if they want to preserve privacy, go back to sending paper letters like some kind of a wild animal?
More competition will come once fixed wireless broadband arrives, but not really. You'll have AT&T (who already sells internet service in some areas) or Verizon (ditto) that don't really add much to the selection. This would be a good opportunity for a lesser player like Sprint, but I wonder if there's enough of a market for privacy protection that people would switch over it?
I think most people are ignorant of it, or have resigned themselves that it isn't a battle worth fighting, so they carry their Google spy-phone with them everywhere they go, talk in front of their Amazon spy at home, meaning that selling them spy-free internet service wouldn't be easy.
@alain williams
...something like this?
"This GoFundMe [campaign] will pay to purchase the data of Donald Trump and every congressperson who voted for SJR34, and to make it publicly available."
""American consumers should not have to be lawyers or engineers to figure out if their information is protected," Pai recently told Democratic lawmakers."
So...the solution is to just remove all protections? Oh how fast America has fallen. Not even 4 months now...
"Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) argued today that the privacy rules "hurt job creators and stifle economic growth." Cornyn also said the FCC's privacy rulemaking involves the "government picking winners and losers," and was among the "harmful rules and regulations put forward by the Obama administration at the last moment.""
Stifle economic growth? You mean prevent monopolies from making buckets of money while limiting their customer's privacy. Welcome to Trumpmerica.
They now have a template document with those line to justify everything. Actually, it's easy money from cheap sources that ""hurt job creators and stifle economic growth". Look at countries living out of raw materials - very little need to innovate and create more industries and (better) jobs. It's no surprise many of the most innovative countries are those were resources are or became scarce.
ISPs that makes a lot of money by reselling user data will have *less* incentives to find other source of revenues. Just sit there, people will use the Internet and money will come in. You can even ask money to those who don't want to be tracked - so earn money without actually doing anything and even saving resources.
Anyway, if you look for a job you have now coal mines to work in... and because "all regulations are wrong", I wouldn't bet about the safety rules there...
So in a house with 3 or 4 people with computers... will it be fine tuned to the individual computer or to the "house"? This could be bad news for some folks if someone starts getting ads based on someone else's browsing preferences.
On the other hand, I suppose I could create much mayhem by using the neighbors WiFil....
I assume if all of your home PCs or devices connect to the internet through the central router provided by your ISP then your ISP would see all traffic from those devices aggregated via the WAN IP and stock DNS addresses that your router has. I'm not sure they would be able to get "per device" granularity - but I'm sure someone more knowledgeable would be able to answer that better.
My advice... ditch the stock ISP router if you can, or at the very least put it into "modem only" mode as you can with Virgin Media ones, and replace it (or stick it behind the B/B modem) with a SOHO one that has enough horsepower and an OpenVPN client baked in - such as the ASUS RT-AC88.
Then configure your router with a paid for VPN service so that everything that goes out of your network is encrypted and only talks to the VPN providers DNS.
Cable Modem: EuroDOCSIS 3.0 Compliant
Boot Code Version: PSPU-Boot 1.0.20.1391
Software Version: V1.01.11
Hardware Version: 1.03
(*) Caveat. The only thing plugged into it is a physical cable going to all my own kit internally - ie: dns/dhcp/wireless is all done internally.
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