For the record, Rep. Erik Paulsen voted for allow the sale of this information.
The following article by Ernesto Falcon and Karen Gullo was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website March 31, 2017:
Congress sold Americans’ privacy to already wealthy internet providers.
Congress’ vote to roll back vital broadband privacy protections opens the door to a host of opportunities for your internet service provider to profit from invading your privacy.
Companies like Cox, Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon have a lot of information on their customers because they carry all of their online traffic – so they have addresses, phone numbers, browsing history, websites they frequent, social media posts and much more. To protect customers’ rights to keep that information private, the Federal Communications Commissions passed awesome rules last year requiring the companies to get customers’ permission before trying to sell, record or track their information for profit. This maintained a tradition of communications privacy protections that have been with us for more than twenty years.
Unfortunately, Congress put the interests of already wildly wealthy companies over the interests of hundreds of millions of Americans who value their privacy and are sick and tired of being tracked by advertisers through their smartphones, tablets and other devices. A slim majority of the House of Representatives voted to repeal the FCC’s rules and give our personal information to cable and internet companies that already make huge profits off consumers and often hold powerful monopolies in markets where they operate. The vote was along party lines, with Republicans voting to repeal the privacy rules and a small handful joining with the Democrats in opposition.
If signed into law by President Donald Trump, ISPs will have a field day hijacking your searches and selling your browsing history to marketers and aggregators who create profiles of consumers. ISPs can also sell your data, and inundate you with unwanted advertisements. One of the few ways to attempt to escape these invasions of privacy is to use a virtual private network service, which will cost you. So not only has Congress sold your privacy down the river to the cable/internet industry, it has made it so you’re paying a privacy tax to VPNs to safeguard your information.
Tossing out the privacy rules also jeopardizes our cybersecurity, because when your data and online activity is being bought, sold, traded and stored, it becomes a target for hackers, malware and security flaws that can be exploited by bad guys. Just consider the pace of massive data breaches – in 2011 102 million Sony records were comprised after hackers targeted the PlayStation Network; in 2013 tens of millions of credit and debit card numbers were stolen from Target; in 2105 up to 80 million records in health insurer Anthem’s customer database were stolen, and in December Yahoo revealed that 1.5 billion user accounts were affected by data breaches caused by hackers. And don’t forget the government – we’re living in a golden age of surveillance by state actors. It’s just a matter of time before the government demands access to the trove of private information internet providers will collect and store.
How did we get here? The cable and telephone industry actively lobbied Congress to roll back broadband privacy protections passed by the FCC, and found a friend in Senator Jeff Flake, R-AZ, in the Senate and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, in the House, who introduced resolutions to repeal the rules.
The cable and telephone industry floated several myths to convince Congress to go along with it, such as consumer privacy will still be protected by states and the Federal Trade Commission. Actually courts have blocked the FTC’s ability to enforce privacy rules on ISPs, and a patchwork of mismatched state rules can’t provide nearly the protection that a clear, bright-line rule at the national level.
So what’s next, and what can you do? Unfortunately, preventing ISP tracking online isn’t that simple. The only thing that will keep your ISP from snooping on you is to encrypt all of your traffic, using either a VPN or Tor. Neither of these solutions are fail-safe and they can be cumbersome.
The charge to reverse Congress’ missteps will be led by consumers and organizations like ours. It won’t be long before internet providers begin to engage in a cavalcade of invasive and unacceptable practices – think how you’ll feel when you find that your browsing history was sold to the highest bidder. We hope consumers will send a loud and clear message to lawmakers that they value their privacy and won’t stand for egregious practices that treat private information like a commodity to be sold for profit.
View the post here.