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Senate Guts Privacy Rules. Will House Follow Suit?

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Re: Senate Guts Privacy Rules. Will House Follow Suit?

#41
post #33
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uh, no Democrat voted for this. "The Senate" didn't vote for this. The Republicans did.

Do you have a source for this? Not arguing. Just looking for data.

Vote tallies are posted online. Here's the URL for S.J. Res. 34 [0]:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...

Grouped By Vote Position is most useful for this question, they don't offer a by-party grouping but it's pretty easy to scan all 50 YEAs and see every one is followed by an "R." All the NAYs are from Democrats or independents. Senator Isakson (R) didn't vote because he's recovering from surgery, I don't know why Rand Paul (R) didn't vote.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-joint-re...

Re: Senate Guts Privacy Rules. Will House Follow Suit?

#42
post #33
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uh, no Democrat voted for this. "The Senate" didn't vote for this. The Republicans did.

Do you have a source for this? Not arguing. Just looking for data.

48 republicans for. 46 democrats, 2 independents against. 2 republicans abstained.

The democratic party is greedy and selfish, but their positions on many issues are far less anti-human.

Re: Senate Guts Privacy Rules. Will House Follow Suit?

#45
post #17

Is there any way to protect your browsing?

A VPN you trust not to keep logs, and/or TOR.

Some VPN providers "get it," and make a point to not keep logs (so if someone asks for them, they can in good conscience say: "sorry") - NordVPN comes to mind.

I've been shopping around for VPN routers and provider in light of this, and I expect others are too. I've used Tor in the past, but I expect for all of the devices in our house, that might get a bit cumbersome. I'd also like someone to hold accountable for QoS issues.

Re: Senate Guts Privacy Rules. Will House Follow Suit?

#46
I would have preferred them to vote the other way, but I'm trying to do a reality check here. Given that on HTTPS sites it's just the domain name + timestamp, and that more and more sites are transitioning to HTTPS, is the mere domain name and timestamp really that useful? I can imagine it being useful to know you order pizzas at 7pm Thursdays, but how useful is it actually to know you e.g. browse Amazon 2pm Mondays, or use YouTube 10pm Saturdays, or send emails with Gmail every hour of every day? They have no idea what you're buying or watching or sending. (eBay seems to be the major exception since it's HTTP.)

Re: Senate Guts Privacy Rules. Will House Follow Suit?

#47

If you do talk with your representatives, remind them this essentially means their browsing history, and the histories of their families, their constituents, and their constituents families will be available for sale at best, or once collected and sold are highly likely to be in a databreach before long. The aggregate of that information will be used to treat those people differently in some aspect or another.

Trying to get caught up on this. How big a difference is this to what Google and Facebook are doing currently?

Google and Facebook's privacy policies put fairly strict limitations on how your data will be used, and shared.

If their privacy policies change to something that you are unwilling to tolerate, the cost to you of switching to a competitor is... Neither low, but not insurmountable.

These companies are well aware of this - which is why they care about how they use your private information.

For most Americans, if their ISP, (Or their ISP, and their only competitor) adopt anti-user policies, there is nothing that they can do.

I can put up with some discomfort by switching to DDG for my websearches. I can't afford to be a peer to a T3 ISP.

It's software vs hardware.

Re: Senate Guts Privacy Rules. Will House Follow Suit?

#48
post #35
post #29

I won't be surprised if AT&T revives its "Internet Preferences" targeted ads program[1]. Most customers apparently didn't care and were willing to put up with it for a $29/mo discount. AT&T never indicated why they canceled it, but my money is that it was due to the FCC regulations that were put in place. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/att-t...

Considering that a good number of people used NetZero back in the day, this isn't a stretch. We've come to accept privacy as a luxury service.

At least some people used NetZero not because they were willing to tolerate ads, but because it was some way, any way, of getting a net connection. Hell, I tried find way to keep that annoying ad setup from even loading. I thought I was very clever that summer I used an independent PPP program under Linux to get the net connection, but no ads. Of course, that was detected and blocked after a while.

Re: Senate Guts Privacy Rules. Will House Follow Suit?

#49

I would have preferred them to vote the other way, but I'm trying to do a reality check here. Given that on HTTPS sites it's just the domain name + timestamp, and that more and more sites are transitioning to HTTPS, is the mere domain name and timestamp really that useful? I can imagine it being useful to know you order pizzas at 7pm Thursdays, but how useful is it actually to know you e.g. browse Amazon 2pm Mondays,…

If it weren't useful, why would ISPs spend money lobbying to get access to it?

Re: Senate Guts Privacy Rules. Will House Follow Suit?

#50

I would have preferred them to vote the other way, but I'm trying to do a reality check here. Given that on HTTPS sites it's just the domain name + timestamp, and that more and more sites are transitioning to HTTPS, is the mere domain name and timestamp really that useful? I can imagine it being useful to know you order pizzas at 7pm Thursdays, but how useful is it actually to know you e.g. browse Amazon 2pm Mondays,…

You could tell a lot about me just based on domain names I frequent.
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