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Security surveillance unlock privacy

Quick: Name five people you lot'd dearest to testify all the internet traffic that has always gone through your router. Every page you and anyone else using your unsecured Wi-Fi ever visited, every ad ever served to yous from any of those pages, how long you lingered on the pages you visited, whether you scrolled downward or signed upwards or bought anything, and all of it fourth dimension-stamped. Ameliorate yet, would you donate that information to a private mindshare broker, which brags well-nigh using a botnet AI to conduct psy ops and sway elections for the highest bidder?

Sen. Jeff Bit (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) take introduced Congressional Review Act resolutions that would overturn the FCC's privacy rules for ISPs. The resolutions will allow ISPs to sell the web histories of their customers to any "trusted partner" they wish. The resolutions hamstring FCC authority now and in the future; beyond just overturning the FCC'south current privacy rules, they would prevent the FCC from issuing whatever regulation that is "substantially the same" in the future. So not only does the current privacy protection confronting selling anybody'due south Isp histories evaporate, but it tin can never be reinstated, nor presumably anything more stringent or consumer-focused. The advertisement organizations behind this legislative codswallop aren't exactly trying to hide. They've released a press release thanking their loyal, obedient politicians for pushing for this law.

Broadly interpreted, a direct repeal would mean that since ISPs are mutual carriers, any company that has even a side concern equally an Internet service provider would be complimentary from this privacy oversight. Google includes Google Fiber in its endless list of subsidiaries, which would mean that Google gets to sell your whole history. Cool.

In the wake of Citizens United decision that coin equals oral communication, these theoretically civic-minded acts are another thinly veiled attempt to write corporate interests into law. You don't have to dig deep to find Koch brothers and telecom sympathies in Rep. Blackburn'southward "ideology." Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and Charter — Charter! — all "spoke" freely to Blackburn last yr. And then did Koch Industries itself, not fifty-fifty bothering to obscure its political agency behind the proper noun of the Club For Growth, like it did with Sen. Flake. Backside all this, the second wealthiest financial estate in the nation, and at its captain two rich dudes: Charles and David Koch.

Why do two rich dudes get to control so much? Flake, Blackburn, and others like them are being made tools of corporations, and you tin can lookout man the representatives plow around and speak the company line on the public dime. They're putting along corporate desires as ideological virtues past talking about what Time Warner wants, as if information technology'due south the same thing as "states' rights." The interests of Verizon, Comcast, and Lease simply coincide with those of the state of Tennessee because those are the but ISPs that exercise business at that place; Google Cobweb is faltering, although final anyone heard it's totally nonetheless gonna wire upward Nashville, existent soon now.

Chairman Ajit Pai is getting really precious about the FCC's nominal openness initiative, fifty-fifty going so far equally to accept the FCC's Twitter hashtag posts with #sunshineweek, because sunlight is the best disinfectant. And sunshine sounds happy. Pai has gone to keen lengths to point out that the FCC'south next major meeting is open-access, as if it were a town hall meeting, to which mere mortal constituents are entitled admission. But no — dainty try, citizens. That March 23 meeting is a dial-in teleconference between members of an informal working grouping. It's non a boondocks hall meeting. Constituents will non be given a hazard to speak. Nobody is going to answer press questions, permit alone are the members of this working grouping going to disrupt their own work to talk to the audience at large. How many people dialing in can their phone system even handle, anyway?

Let me be clear: I'm not proverb the long-term assault on American privacy is a strictly Republican try. The Democrats were just every bit anxious to hop on board with PRISM and SOPA, and let'due south non any of united states of america forget the TPP. But Flake, Marshburn, Pai and their colleagues are banking that you won't observe what they're upwardly to on behalf of their corporate sponsors, considering you can't complain if you don't detect. Pai himself is acting similar a corporate automaton, trying to do human-like things in hopes that nosotros won't notice he'south actually but programmed to say "DEREGULATE" in tones that evoke the Daleks.

What would politics look similar if our representatives were required to put "sponsored content" on their bills and press releases? What is the monetary value of your web history, and why do advertisers need rights to go it gratis written into law? Shouldn't you be able to opt in to having things sold to you? And is anyone so desperate to run across more targeted ads that they're willing to give ISPs the right to buy and sell this data, with no hope of oversight or control of how it's used? If so, speak up in the comments. We'd like to hear from you.

Update, 3/xix/17: The CTIA, an Internet service provider lobbying grouping, filed a brief (PDF) with the FCC chiming in that the FCC should go rid of its privacy regulations well before their scheduled December dissolution. The group asserts that Section 222's apply of the phrase "customer proprietary network data" constitutes proof that the regulation doesn't necessarily cover "personal" information. The provisions laid out in Section 222 "apply only to commercially valuable—not personal—data," CTIA concludes.

These complete masters of doublethink are claiming that our personal web history is non "commercially valuable." Except of course information technology is valuable. Why else practise ad companies want information technology? If there's no value in this data, why is the CTIA spending money to foyer the FCC for before access? They wouldn't try to go it if information technology didn't have some kind of value to them, and these are not philanthropic organizations. They are fundamentally commercial, and they see value in the information directly relevant to their commercial activity. The customer owns it, ISPs want to sell information technology, and advertising agencies desire to buy it. Personal spider web data therefore has commercial value, QED.

Ane question remains, though, like a splinter in my encephalon. Why should an ISP, instead of me, get paid for the sale of my "customer proprietary" network data?