All your private online data,
including the websites you visit, the content of your chats and e-mails, your
personal information, and your location, just became suddenly less secure. This
is because Congress just blocked
crucial privacy regulations. This will allow your Internet Service Provider to
collect all your data and sell all that data to the highest bidder without
asking for your permission. This must have been what the Indians felt when
negotiating with the white man.
A pair of resolutions, which
passed through the Senate and House with exclusively
Republican votes, will roll back
rules previously proposed by the Democratic leadership of the Federal
Communications Commission during the Obama administration that was passed in
October of last year but had not yet gone into effect.
These FCC rules called the Net
Neutrality Rules or Title II will be completely dead following the expected
signature of President Trump. The rules would have required ISP’s to get
explicit and specific approval from customers before selling the following
“sensitive data”:
§
Your
precise geo-location
§
Children’s
information
§
Health
information
§
Financial
information
§
Social
Security numbers
§
Web
browsing history
§
App
usage history
§
Content
of communications
Since the rules were rolled back
through the Congressional Review Act, the FCC is also barred from creating any
similar rules in the years to come. In theory, the information collected will
be stored under some sort of ID separate from your actual name. But that’s cold
comfort considering the level of detail from this sort of information would
make your identity a dead giveaway. Also, ISP’s can hardly be trusted to keep
your information suitably safe from prying eyes since they can sell all these
to the highest bidder.
There are a few things you can do
to try and keep your data safe, and while they aren’t really easy to do,
they’re worth the effort if you value your privacy.
Inform
your ISP you’re “opting out”
You can visit or call your ISP to
inform them that you’re opting out of all advertising-related things in your
package, and tell them point blank that they need your permission before
selling any of your data to advertisers. The former will force them to comply, though
the latter is doubtful, but at least will give them second thoughts.
Limit
data passing through your ISP
Try to keep sensitive data such as those listed
at the top by reverting back to hard copies or not storing or mentioning these
online but storing them instead in removable external drives or burning them on
CD’s. You can also opt to buy apps that can encrypt data or your ISP address,
but these will often charge an annual subscription fee. Also, if you opt for
using a VPN to hide your ISP address, remember that a VPN is itself an ISP so
research on a VPN before committing to it.
