I was going to title the thread "Fucking fucking fuck fuck" but that applies to so many things these days, and I wanted to be more specific. Anyhoo, so the Senate just voted 50-48 to allow ISPs to sell your browsing data to third parties. We've had to fight these assholes in the past over this shit, and yet here they go again. These bills have been defeated before, even with a previous Administration whom, I feel, was too lax on internet privacy laws, and was rescued by an FCC administration feeling those bills were overreaching. Unfortunately for us, however, corporations are ramping up their influence with the current administration, who cares nothing for privacy laws, and is in favor of big corporations getting a piece of the bandwidth pie. Link: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/senate-allows-isps-sell-data,33968.html
Here's the names. My boy Paul voted nah, but Rubio voted yay. http://www.commondreams.org/news/20...ficed-your-broadbandprivacy-corporate-profits
And there's Rob Portman. *sigh* I guess I'm going to have to write the shit heel. If it still passes, I hope the first thing that gets sold and released is the browsing history of the Senators who voted for the bill's passage.
Rubio I'm disappointed in, as he's young enough and technology savvy enough to know better. Cruz, though? He's just a gobshite anyway. I think he'd sell his own mother if it would guarantee him a step closer to money and power.
According to the article the only ones who didn't vote "yes" voted "absent," since they were apparently too chickenshit to go against the party line.
Well, at least one of their balls dropped. Too bad the other didn't as well And, for the easy troll, even @Federal Farmer's balls descended before those schmucks'...
Wouldn't be a problem if we could have some damn competition in the market. And don't give me something about "natural monopolies", that's horseshit when it comes to ISPs. That said, all this changes is now ISPs don't have to tell you if they're selling your data; they still could before, just not without telling you, no doubt buried in a privacy policy you've never read.
Those aren't regulated at all. They've been able to sell your browsing history without notification since always. They can't lie in their privacy policies, but then they don't have to mention tracking your browsing history when they tell you what information they do and don't collect. The best thing to do is, if available, switch to an ISP with a good privacy policy. 2nd-best, use HTTPS wherever available. ISPs can still tell what sites you're accessing, but not what pages or their contents.
I always assumed they were already doing it. In fact I assume that everything I do on the internet is logged and sitting somewhere in a database.
Hey, this internet thing is awesome! Let's see how fast we can ruin it. Pretty much the trajectory of this tech. Early days it's run by engineers, it's wild and woolly, then once it's successful the lawyers and accountants grab hold of it and just suck the life away. Then the advertising industry gets on board and it's just another venue for pushing useless shit at us.
Here is the problem with that idea. 80% plus of the country only has one high speed ISP. Also high speed is kind of a joke name because what the US calls high speed is called low speed in many, many other countries. Hell, most states give out official monopolies where other competitors s are legally prohibited so good luck trying to find a market based solution where no market based competition exists. Oh, and Republicans are huge backers of cable monopolies so don't confuse them with someone who cares about market competition.