Slashdot Mirror
The FCC Says It Can't Force Google and Facebook To Stop Tracking Their Users (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The FCC announced that it will not prevent Facebook, Google, and other websites from not honoring users' Do Not Track requests that make it difficult for them to track online activities. The Washington Post reports: "The announcement is a blow to privacy advocates who had petitioned the agency for stronger Internet privacy rules. But it's a win for many Silicon Valley companies whose business models rely on monetizing Internet users' personal data. It's also the latest move in an ongoing battle to defend the agency's new net neutrality rules, which opponents warned would result in the regulation of popular Web sites and online services. By rejecting the petition, the FCC likely hopes to defuse that argument. The rules, which took effect this summer, allow the FCC to regulate only providers of Internet access, not individual Web sites, said a senior agency official."
Because it's the FTC's job, not the FCC's.
The Federal Trade Commission regulates things like this -- business interactions with customers -- in the same way it regulates the federal Do Not Call list.
If you are asking the FCC to regulate this, you are asking the wrong regulatory body; you might as well be asking the FDA to regulate it, because you think that being tracked all the time is injurious to people's mental health.
Exactly. I recently got fiber and now have a 40mbps connection with much lower latency than the previous connection. But, sites load just as slowly now as they did then in many cases. Some of them have actually gotten worse.
So, now I use additional adblockers in addition to noscript, request policy and ghostery. Not to mention privacy badger to further screw up the tracking.
The worst thing is that there's no purpose the only times I ever click on ads are either a complete mistake or because the information is a simple text ad that's relevant to the page I'm looking at. I don't care what I looked at earlier this morning, the page I'm on has information that's relevant to what I want now, not what happened last month.
Yeah, that must be why Chrome's percentage of the browser market has been tanking... oh wait.
It's pretty simple - if you don't like what a company is doing, don't use their products. But people don't like to do that - they want to have their cake and eat it too. I quit Facebook a couple years ago. Most of my family (including my wife) continues to use it, though; and it's the standard place family photos and family news first get posted. Sometimes you miss out on certain things by making the choice to not participate... and that's the hard part of making that decision.
Not using Chrome, and using an alternative search engine like DuckDuckGo, is an easier choice to make - but it still requires a conscious decision and a change in your personal habits.
Obviously this isn't 100% effective - Facebook and Google have lots of ways to track individuals, including back room deals with companies like Verizon for access to super cookies and whatnot. But it's at least making their records incomplete and harder to tie to you as a specific individual... not to mention the tacit approval people who continue to use their services are providing them.
#DeleteChrome