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Comcast, AT&T, Verizon Pose a Greater Surveillance Risk Than Facebook (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance risk than Facebook -- but their surveillance is much harder to avoid," writes Salome Viljoen in an opinion piece for The Guardian. From the report: "Facebook isn't the only company that amasses troves of data about people and leaves it vulnerable to exploitation and misuse. As of last year, Congress extended the same data-gathering practices of tech companies like Google and Facebook to internet providers like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. Because service providers serve as gatekeepers to the entire internet, they can collect far more information about us, and leave us with far less power to opt out of that process. This means that the risks of allowing our internet providers to collect and monetize the same type of user data that Facebook collects -- and the potential that such data will therefore be misused -- are much, much worse. Your internet provider doesn't just know what you do on Facebook -- it sees all the sites you visit and how much time you spend there. Your provider can see where you shop, what you watch on TV, where you choose to eat dinner, what medical symptoms you search, where you apply for work, school, a mortgage. Everything that is unencrypted is fair game. But internet providers don't just pose a greater surveillance risk than Facebook -- their surveillance is also far harder to avoid. 'Choosing' not to use an internet provider to avoid surveillance is not really a choice at all. As of 2016, only about half of Americans have more than one option for broadband internet. In rural areas, this number drops to just 13%.
How about "already are a greater surveillance risk than Facebook "?
"Everything that is unencrypted is fair game."
Finally, the summary gets to the core. All the rest is fear-mongering. More, and increasingly more, services are encrypted. The one which isn't, and needs to be, is DNS, which traffic they could snoop to see who you're talking with. But, some trusted VPN or TOR or other solution will get around even that, if someone cares.
With so much content being cloud hosted (AWS/Azure/GCloud), it's getting hard to tell who someones talking to just by IP, which is all the ISPs have left if traffic is encrypted.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law