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US Congress Votes To Shred ISP Privacy Rules (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The U.S. House of Representatives has just approved a "congressional disapproval" vote of privacy rules, which gives your ISP the right to sell your internet history to the highest bidder. The measure passed by 232 votes to 184 along party lines, with one Democrat voting in favor and 14 not voting. This follows the same vote in the Senate last week. Just prior to the vote, a White House spokesman said the president supported the bill, meaning that the decision will soon become law. This approval means that whoever you pay to provide you with internet access -- Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, etc -- will be able to sell everything they know about your use of the internet to third parties without requiring your approval and without even informing you. That information can be used to build a very detailed picture of who you are: what your political and sexual leanings are; whether you have kids; when you are at home; whether you have any medical conditions; and so on -- a thousand different data points that, if they have sufficient value to companies willing to pay for them, will soon be traded without your knowledge. With over 100 million households online in the United States, that means Congress has just given Big Cable an annual payday of between $35 billion and $70 billion.
Hey moron, ISPs have been able to sell your anonymized data since forever. How have you been hurt by this?
Oh, and those rules never went into effect. Doh!
Yes, Republicans will allow individuals to sign contracts that allow ISP's to rape their privacy - believing that people should pretty much be able to do what they want as long as they are willing to pay the consequences.
Democrats on the hand, want everyone except for the rich to be able to avoid all negative consequences -- afterall they can always find someone other than themselves to blame, and democrats are sure happy to rape anyone except the poor or illegals for anything that makes them feel good. They even get a thrill out of making nuns pay for medical insurance that covers abortions.
They both suck, but I know which one is worse.
Net Neutrality is next.
What about "Headline Neutrality". As soon as I read that Congress voted to "shred" my rights, I knew I was only going to get one, very biased, side of the story. The truth is that this vote changes nothing. The FCC had already revoked most privacy protections, and this vote just prevents those rules from being reinstated.
You're okay with powerful government already busted several times for spying on Americans, but should BigTelCo do it, you're OUTRAGED!!!! Or are you outraged that big government that is spying on you wants to use the proxies to spy on you even more? Oh wait, you don't care about Big Government spying on you, because RUSSIA HACKED THE ELECTIONS and TRUMP IS EVIL got your goat?
We've already lost the war, this is just a mop up battle for the remaining bits of resistance out there.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.