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What’s sauce for the gander: Congress’ trips to GovTrack.us made public IRT
Last week, Congress passed and sent a bill to the President that will greatly decrease individual privacy and cybersecurity (for more, see Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) “Five Ways Cybersecurity Will Suffer If Congress Repeals the FCC Privacy Rules”). S.J.Res. 34: A joint resolution providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, submitted by the FCC relating to “Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services” will roll back the FCC regulation passed last year that required Internet service providers (ISPs) — like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner, Cox, and CenturyLink — to hold all Internet browsing data, as well as data regarding app usage on mobile devices, to the same privacy requirements as sensitive or private personal information. The Republican-controlled Congress repealed those privacy-protecting rules, and the President is set to sign the bill any day now. BTW, none of the big ISPs have publicly supported the rule change, but a group of Small ISPs wrote a public letter to Congress opposing Congress’s Move to Abolish Privacy Protections — including, I’m happy to say, MY awesome local ISP called MonkeyBrains! So if you’re concerned about your Internet privacy rights, I’d definitely recommend getting off of Comcast et al and signing up with one of the ISPs that signed the letter. Do it ASAP!
While it’s unclear if this will be possible or even legal, there has been a crop of FundMe and Kickstarter projects springing up to collect $$ to purchase Congress’ browsing history and make it public in retaliation for Congress killing Internet privacy rules. And I just found that our friends at GovTrack.US have just made public a running tally in real time of “any time someone visits GovTrack.us from within the United States Senate, House of Representatives, or the White House, and their associated office buildings.” GovTrack is following the lead of the CongressEdits twitter feed, making a public record of Congress’ moves and actions across the Intertubes.
In March 2017 the U.S. Congress passed a bill that rolled back regulations prohibiting Internet service providers from selling subscribers’ browsing habits to advertisers. Since browsing history metadata is no big deal to Congress, we began publishing the browsing history of anyone visting GovTrack.us from Congress’s and the White House’s office buildings.
We Have 24 Hours to Save Online Privacy Rules
We Have 24 Hours to Save Online Privacy Rules BY KATE TUMMARELLO, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
We are one vote away from a world where your ISP can track your every move online and sell that information to the highest bidder. Call your lawmakers now and tell them to protect federal online privacy rules.
The Senate voted last week 50-48 on a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to repeal the FCC’s privacy rules. Now the resolution heads over the House, where it’s scheduled to get a vote on Tuesday.
Congress Set to Kill FCC Privacy Rule
Politico reports that Congress is set to cancel the privacy rules that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) established in December. The rule is intended to to implement the Congressional requirement that "telecommunications carriers protect the confidentiality of customer proprietary information."
TICK, TOCK ON CRA – Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune said Tuesday the votes to rescind the FCC broadband privacy rules under the Congressional Review Act are being "whipped as we speak," and he expects the resolution will have the support it needs "in the end." Thune also said a vote on the CRA could come as early as this week…. "We’re very committed to continuing to go down that path of using the Congressional Review Act resolutions of disapproval to undo a lot of what we think is the regulatory damage done by the previous administration," Thune told reporters. [POLITICO’s Morning Tech, 03/22/2017].
S.J.Res.34 would cancel the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule relating to "Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services" (81 Fed. Reg. 87274 (December 2, 2016)).
From the rule summary:
The rules require carriers to provide privacy notices that clearly and accurately inform customers; obtain opt-in or opt-out customer approval to use and share sensitive or non-sensitive customer proprietary information, respectively; take reasonable measures to secure customer proprietary information; provide notification to customers, the Commission, and law enforcement in the event of data breaches that could result in harm; not condition provision of service on the surrender of privacy rights; and provide heightened notice and obtain affirmative consent when offering financial incentives in exchange for the right to use a customer’s confidential information.
Broadband Privacy Rules Under Attack
InfoWorld reports on the measures that the FCC under Ajit Pai and Republicans in Congress are taking to "to ensure nothing stands in the way of ISPs profiting off your personal data."
- All hope of broadband privacy bites the dust, by Caroline Craig, InfoWorld (Mar 10, 2017).
Pai and Ohlhausen said they favored having privacy oversight uniformly administered by the FTC. But they disingenuously failed to mention that the FTC is barred by statute from regulating common carriers—and the FCC reclassified broadband as a utility in 2015 in order to implement net neutrality rules. The FTC wrote the new privacy rules to close the gap in oversight the move created.
FCC Stops Privacy Rule Before It Takes Effect
In one area, the Trump administration will allow more access to information. Unfortunately, the information is not pubic data, but data on your personal use of the Internet and access will be given to private sector marketers. The Trump Administration’s FCC stayed the FCC’s recently adopted Privacy Rules before they could take effect on March 2. The effect will be to allow Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to sell your personal data for marketing or advertisement purposes without your permission.
Trump’s New FCC Chairman Lets ISPs Sell Your Private Data Without Your Consent by Mohit Kumar, Hacker News (March 02, 2017)
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