No More Privacy

On March 28, the House Republicans voted to repeal a set of proposed FCC rules that would have given strong privacy protection to ISP customers. This party-line vote follows another party-line vote in the Senate that also approved this measure.

Not a single Democrat voted for it.

There is not a single consumer friendly argument that can be made for this.

The only conclusion you can draw is that Republicans think earning profit for the ISP is more important than protecting the privacy of consumers.

Now, ISPs can sell all of your personal Internet activities to anyone without your permission.

ISPs can gather a lot information about you, far more than Facebook, Google or Amazon.

And unlike those sites, very often, you cannot choose another ISP.

It’s time to promote initiatives like HTTPS everywhere and Let’s Encrypt. These are not enough, though. Even if every site switched to HTTPS, an ISP can still track which sites (domains) you’ve visited. VPN is a solution, but it’s not a great one since you are delegating your privacy to another commercial entity. TOR Project like solution is the only way.

Future

ISPs can make money by

• selling you access to the Internet
• selling you media and other content
• advertising to you
• selling any information they gathered about you to anyone

It’s my belief that the access to Internet should be regulated like access to electricity and gas. Operated like a public utility and not privately controlled.

Once you take “selling access” away from the ISPs, you can certainly treat them like the rest of the Internet companies. For them to have full control over each person’s access to the Internet and still be able to behave like the rest of the Internet companies is too much power.