Senate votes to allow ISPs access to customers’ private data

By Heather Hamilton, Contributing Writer

Last week, the U.S. Senate voted to eliminate a rule forcing ISPs to get your consent prior to selling your app usage and browsing history to advertisers. Should the House of Representatives follow their colleagues in the Senate, the Federal Communications Commission’s rules are effectively dead, though they aren’t even set to take effect until at least December 4, 2017. Fifty Republican senators voted in favor and 48 Democrats voted against.

The Senate invoked the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to get rid of regulations it doesn’t like and prevent the agency from issuing similar regulations going forward. According to an article in Ars Technica, this is better than if the FCC were to undo its own rules because, under the Congressional Review Act, they’d now be unable to reinstate them.

Right now, ISPs can use your browsing history for profit, whether it is related to one customer or aggregated as part of an anonymous group. Ars Technica says that Democrats warned that the revocation of such rules will allow ISPs to draw a map of where families shop and go to school, detect health information, and build customized profiles of both listening and viewing history.

Right now, ISPs cannot see encrypted traffic, which means that they can see the domain you visit but not the pages within. While it technically could be worse, there’s still a lot of information being revealed — where you bank, what political party you belong to, etc.

The FCC’s decision, passed in February 2015, classified home and mobile ISPs as common carriers, which allowed for net neutrality rules to be enforced, and disallowed the Federal Trade Commission its governance of such rules. Congress could return control to the FTC, whose guidelines regarding privacy are weaker than the FCC’s.

Customers want to be in charge of their own sensitive information, but according to an article at Privacy News Online, the senators supporting the stripping of privacy rights have previously filed with the FCC to claim that app data and web history do not constitute sensitive information. For those worried about their private data, it might be possible to opt out.

All major ISP lobby groups signed a voluntary set of privacy principles based on FTC framework in January, pledging to follow their guidance for opting in before sharing consumer information. To figure out how opting out works, users should visit their ISP’s website or give them a call. While it may be time-consuming to opt out, the option will be there.

Consumers can also consider using a VPN service, Tor, or HTTPS. “That’s basically it; those are the three ways that you can encrypt [your browsing] so that the ISP can’t see it,” said Jeremy Gillula, Senior Staff Technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, to Ars Technica. “They’ll be able to see that you’re using a VPN or Tor, but nothing else.”

The potential decision is receiving reactions from indifference to panic, in part because the FCC policies aren’t officially in place. For many consumers, the decision will come and go with no known impact on their life. For others, this represents a significant step backwards in the protection of privacy.

Customers who wish to weigh in are encouraged to call their elected officials.

Sources: Congress, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Govtrack.us, Privateinternetaccess.com, and Ars Technica