ISPs and Privacy

Last October, the FCC set up new privacy rules for our internet service providers.

They were supposed to do things like:

• Let us know if our accounts got hacked
• Make it tougher for them to sell our private data without our permission
• Since, after all, web sites are allowed to do that. It's not fair to have a double standard!

They were scheduled to take effect on Mar 2.

At the last minute, the new FCC placed those new rules on hold.

The legalese isn't that difficult to decipher:

http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017/db0301/FCC-17-19A1.pdf

Basically, it's claiming that all the gargantuan ISPs (who, of course, are thoroughly devoted to placing your interests first, since they probably have a monopoly on your internet access) are really worried that these new rules will be tough for the little guys to implement in time.

Since it was released one day before the new rules took effect, they must have been working night and day so they could flip the switches and make the internet safer for everyone, right?

This couldn't possibly be a thing where the big guys are already selling details about whichever sites you visit, and stopping would cost them money.

Right?

Surely they wouldn't do that.

The official FCC report basically says that we can trust them.

Never mind that one of their major arguments is that this sets up two different standards. It places a higher burden on ISPs than the one that's placed on individual web sites like Facebook or Google.

By itself, that's a great big smoking gun with their bloody fingerprints all over it.

If you decide to spend an evening researching that weird lump that's shown up on your sister's breast, your ISP knows all about it. Odds are, so does anyone who hacks them. Whichever search engine you used knows, and facebook has weird creepy ways to figure it out. But you have options in those cases.

And now they can just sell that information to your insurance company. Right now, that's supposed to be something you opt into.

We all know we can trust them, right? Since they have our best interests at heart?

After all, I have nothing to hide. What are you worried about?

*Please* go research the Onion Router at https://www.torproject.org/. The last time I checked, it makes your internet experience a little slower, and it wasn't simple enough to recommend for general use. But now...https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https is a cute little interactive infographic that sums it up pretty well.

I haven't done as much research into it as I should. I know that it isn't a real privacy tool, even though most of the people who have ever even heard about it seem to think it's just for hackers. But it's a lot better than what most of us have now.