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Telecoms say they have a First Amendment right to sell private data

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Re: Telecoms say they have a First Amendment right to sell private data

#11

Sure. Just get the corporate entity to say a single word. No representatives. No notes. No proxies. No robots. No automated voices. The actual corporate legal entity. Not even the CEO. No clever stand-ins with same name. Just one mouthed, audible word to confirm the entity can qualify for speech. Then we can consider "free speech" for that entity. I can only dream this would hold up even as I know there are likely do…

A mute person has the right too :)

Re: Telecoms say they have a First Amendment right to sell private data

#12
When I worked at a large telco/broadband provider in the 90s and onward such concepts of selling this data was forbidden and you'd get funny looks for suggesting it. Our leadership chain - comprised of a mixture of long tenured employees with mostly engineering backgrounds supported not wanting to sell this data as well. It wasn't until the mid 2000s when our leadership got swapped out with younger executives who'd do 2 year rotations across the company and were looking to do a fast big bang to wow others that would go down this road. It wasn't just selling data this new gang wanted, but DNS redirection (think for nxdomains), and ad insertion thru TCP seassion hijacking platforms. There were a number of startups who were happy to give us free gear to sniff & manipulate customer traffic and we'd get a cut of the ad money.

Re: Telecoms say they have a First Amendment right to sell private data

#14
post #11

Sure. Just get the corporate entity to say a single word. No representatives. No notes. No proxies. No robots. No automated voices. The actual corporate legal entity. Not even the CEO. No clever stand-ins with same name. Just one mouthed, audible word to confirm the entity can qualify for speech. Then we can consider "free speech" for that entity. I can only dream this would hold up even as I know there are likely do…

A mute person has the right too :)

A mute person can write. Or sign. A corporate entity doesn't communicate in any way. Because... It obviously cannot.

Re: Telecoms say they have a First Amendment right to sell private data

#15
The big telcos have always been horrible and they will never change. I used to work for a small provider in that industry and always hated USWest because of that experience. They will never change as long as they exist, whatever name they go by.

Good to see Maine has a law protecting privacy. I agree with other commenters that this kind of law should be broad-spectrum, affecting all businesses from telcos to lemonade stands.

My ISP is a municipal fiber provider with strong and proud Net Neutrality. Obviously NN isn't a privacy issue, but it's unlikely to pair with trying to sell personal data (of our own neighbors!) for cash.

In addition to consumer protection laws, strongly consider supporting local municipal FTTH. Compared to Comcast, I pay less money for unmetered symmetric gigabit, it's run by ordinary people (not comic book villains), and the money stays here in town. All it takes is determined civic engagement.

(And that includes voting out the people who support these attacks against people.)

Re: Telecoms say they have a First Amendment right to sell private data

#16

Sure. Just get the corporate entity to say a single word. No representatives. No notes. No proxies. No robots. No automated voices. The actual corporate legal entity. Not even the CEO. No clever stand-ins with same name. Just one mouthed, audible word to confirm the entity can qualify for speech. Then we can consider "free speech" for that entity. I can only dream this would hold up even as I know there are likely do…

I like where your head's at, but guardians speak on behalf of minors, lawyers speak on behalf of clients, and representatives speak on behalf of their electorate (in theory), so executives speaking on behalf of groups of employees isn't much different.

Re: Telecoms say they have a First Amendment right to sell private data

#18
post #9

That sounds like a pretty desperate argument. What proportion of their revenue are they making from selling this data?

I previously worked under the umbrella of a major Canadian telecom (though in their media arm—radio, publishing, television). I'd heard they gathered a large amount of data, but more to do with the trend of just hoovering up every bit possible and store it in their data lakes. My understanding at the time is they had no idea what to do with it. Some of these initiatives could be rooted in little more than some manage…

Was this Rogers New Media? Just curious because my recollection is that they owned the network infrastructure for the cable internet side and were the first folks in Canada to go big on deep packet inspection boxes (aka Cisco pcube, which was from an acquisition of an Israeli compamy) to deal with "undesirable" traffic but also mining customer data.

Re: Telecoms say they have a First Amendment right to sell private data

#19
post #15

The big telcos have always been horrible and they will never change. I used to work for a small provider in that industry and always hated USWest because of that experience. They will never change as long as they exist, whatever name they go by. Good to see Maine has a law protecting privacy. I agree with other commenters that this kind of law should be broad-spectrum, affecting all businesses from telcos to lemonade…

I would love to see a playbook on making that happen.

Re: Telecoms say they have a First Amendment right to sell private data

#20
post #16

Sure. Just get the corporate entity to say a single word. No representatives. No notes. No proxies. No robots. No automated voices. The actual corporate legal entity. Not even the CEO. No clever stand-ins with same name. Just one mouthed, audible word to confirm the entity can qualify for speech. Then we can consider "free speech" for that entity. I can only dream this would hold up even as I know there are likely do…

I like where your head's at, but guardians speak on behalf of minors, lawyers speak on behalf of clients, and representatives speak on behalf of their electorate (in theory), so executives speaking on behalf of groups of employees isn't much different.

On behalf of groups of investors, perhaps, not employees.
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