Posted on 03/24/2017 6:37:47 AM PDT by ConservativeStatement
The Senate voted to kill Obama-era online privacy regulations, a first step toward allowing internet providers such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to sell your browsing habits and other personal information as they expand their own online ad businesses.
Those rules, not yet in effect, would have required internet providers to ask your permission before sharing your personal information.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
bookmarking
Poor reporting. Personal Information != Browsing History. If you navigate to a company’s website, they have the right to track that information. NOTHING in your internet browser should contain PII. Two separate and distinct issues.
There is no privacy now anyway.
You are what you graze. Best to be Free Range.
The ISP, as a technical necessity, has to know that you (an identified & billable account at a known IP address) sent a data packet to a particular known website or other data service. That’s the whole POINT of an ISP. The particular _user_ may not be personally identified (me? wife? kids?), but enough information can be gleaned for practical marketing purposes (frequent visits to MatildaJane.com from a particular MAC address operating under the account of Mr. CTDonath are clearly Mrs. CTDonath at a known postal address and can be cross-referenced to glean oodles of additional PII - valuable information to marketers of women’s & children’s clothing).
It’s that pesky “metadata” problem. Encryption & anonymization is great (and strong/robust/ubiquitous implementation thereof is vital), but given the enormous amount of traffic being monitored, a great deal can be gleaned just by what data packets travel from where to where.
I’m actually working on a “single sign-on” service for app users for a major ISP. The whole point is we can confidently log you into other services with few/no instances of you manually entering ID & password - largely because we can identify you from numerous other metadata.
Disagree that PII can be gleaned from a browsing history. Navigating to a site leaves my IP and MAC but purchase history is encrypted (HTTPS) so not viewable and is stored in a different segment of long-term memory so not collectible in the same data grab as browsing history. Metadata is up to whomever architects the website, probably updated constantly to meet changing market demands, but will NEVER contain PII as it is embedded in the CSS or XML, not on the client side.
I like single sing-on and we use (what is supposed to be) SSO for our corporate site. This does not protect a user from browsing history unless the ISP spoofs the MAC or generalizes/anonymizes either the MAC or IP.
In either case, PII is not part of the problem and the author of the news piece conflated the two. Meaning they have no technical expertise to write intelligently on the subject and is guilty of spreading incorrect information to the public.
Any regulation originating from the Obama admin concerning the FCC could not be good.
Use an encrypted VPN to a proxy. Then your ISP can’t see anything.
[shrug] So the proxy sees the traffic then. Some improvement, but more hassle & complexity than most people will cope with.
This all looks a lot like the way-back-then hysteria facing the onset of credit card proliferation. Yeah, businesses will monitor & monetize your activities ... but the sheer raging convenience of the technology overwhelmed the alleged risks of privacy loss. Some will take steps to shield themselves, but most won’t.
They will send me ads for women services as I ah...ah look for women services.
Don’t like it? Open your own ISP and provide the public with the best privacy fastest service for free. The heck with evil profiteering.
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