US Senate votes to undo FCC internet privacy rules
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The comments i replied to, which all claimed "this was a power grab by the fcc from the ftc" (which is ajit's talking points), are now deleted. In fact, every account i can find that said similar things is now deleted. https://www.reddit.com/user/danberlin/comments/ (click on context for any of them).
In any case, for the curious, here's the history here:
The FTC historically did privacy for ISP's.
FTC has no section 5 authority (IE to make those kinds of rules) for common carriers. It's specifically exempted by the FTC act, and has been for 90 years. This has been upheld in court. See https://iapp.org/news/a/the-att-v-ftc-common-carrier-ruling-...
In June 2015, the FCC reclassified the ISP's as common carriers.
Tada, the FTC rules no longer apply.
So the FCC regulated them with roughly the same set of rules.
Now they've undone this.
Now the claim is "well, the FTC should be doing it, it was just a power grab by the FCC". But that's not really accurate. The power grab, if any, was reclassifying them as common carriers. Once that was done, they pretty much had to regulate them because the FTC can't.
Because the FTC still doesn't have authority to regulate them, and they are still classed as common carriers, there is a void.
Now, it may actually be better for the FTC to be regulating them. But it's definitely the case that, for the moment, no privacy rules will apply to them because the FTC can't regulate them until the FTC's common carrier exemption is repealed.
See Maureen(an FTC commissioner)'s speech here: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...
Note, the speech is out of date a bit, because since then, the 9th circuit court ruled that the exemption is status based, not activity based, despite what the FTC wants.
Mission accomplished I guess.
Internet browsing history is like one's library, phone and mail records all lumped into one. The Internet is a basic necessity in the developed world, and so it should be treated like a utility (common carrier) that they are.
This is THE SAME THING as the USPS, your library branch, and your telephone carrier selling your transaction records for profit.
It is dispicable.
That isn't a norm I'm aware of. There is plenty of politics every day on HN; there are some limits, but it's common.
This community has active moderators, moderation is their job, not yours. If you don't like a story or a post, flag it so the moderators can do their jobs and move on.
I would rather have a moderator look at a flagged post, determine it's inside/outside rules, and flag/unflag it, than have to read a dozen posts from the peanut gallery with snide rules lectures or debates on whether it's in the rules or not.
(not quite a direct response to you in particular, more of a general observation)
I hate when they do that - replace actual content of the legislation being talked about with genetic description like "aimed to protect you from hackers". Clearly there's a controversy between whether this protection is appropriate or not. I expect from reporting to tell me what controversy is about and let me decide which side I like, not to shove a pre-manufactured opinion down my throat. I've read the article and I still have no idea what the actual disagreement is about. But at least from the comment above I now know the background of what's going on.
I've yet to identify a news website that (a) doesn't do this and (b) writes enough about topics I care about.
I think we'll get back to quality reporting where we can rely on certain publishers, but we're not there yet.
Simply put, the internet gave the world the opportunity to create too much noise and it's going to be awhile until the dust settles or the fog clears.
That they let this kind of shit go on, in addition to allowing The_Donald and other hate groups to exist on their site, is really disheartening and has really turned me off to even visiting much anymore. The place is overrun by bots, paid astroturfers, and vile racists.
But I've seen the term "hate group" sometimes used to silence the expression of views that one finds disagreeable.
In my estimation, what you're advocating is likely to cause more harm than good to the robustness of public debate.
I don't mind political discussion or opinionated pieces if they're intelligent, open-minded, and at least intended to be productive (as opposed to outgrouping and other forms of villification). I'm not interested in 21st century "two minute hates".
I think it's important people get a fair view, regardless of whether i may be initially right or wrong, so thought it was worth mentioning.
I have not delved into "what is the definition of a telecommunications carrier and do ISP's meet it" (or is there some other exception).
This is honestly the most frightening thing to me. Even if prevailing opinions change, they can't bring these regulations back in the future? This seems...majorly problematic.
Edit: The Ars article [1] expands on this a bit further:
> The Senate today used its power under the Congressional Review Act to ensure that the FCC rulemaking "shall have no force or effect" and to prevent the FCC from issuing similar regulations in the future.
I'm not well versed in the Congressional Review Act and what its invocation means here, but I've seen commentary to the effect of "The FCC won’t be able to try again, even if Congress gets back on board".
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/senate-votes-to-...
Either way, it is frightening to think about this passing.
If they didn't include that language, the FCC could just re-implement the rule tomorrow. The language saying they can't enact similar protections means that it would take a new act of congress to allow the FCC to pass a rule like this.
New legislation can override this resolution. New legislation could completely reconstitute the FCC, or eliminate it entirely.
The CRA allows the rules to be recreated if given explicit authorization from a law by congress. So they can be put back in place, just not as easily.
Sorry, I misread that s/he was talking about the bill rather than the administrative rule change that happened first.
But I think it's very telling that when companies interests and individuals interests conflict, then the favor recently has been towards the "freedom" of the companies at the expense of the individual. It's a shame.
But it is a little silly to have a "republican" party in countries (USA, France) where the monarchy is long gone.
So it's not "silly" except that the same word "conservative" means different things in different contexts. Though that's true of the words "liberal", "democratic", "federal", and "republican" for that matter.
It's a pet peeve of mine. Same when people use democratic vs Democratic (party) interchangeably.
But that's actually irrelevant. You shouldn't have to lift a finger to protect your basic rights. You ought to get them by default.
How could anyone in good conscience think this is good for the people?
Dear god fuck it all.
(let's not even consider how an ISP analyzing traffic to sell would have an unfair advantage to other advertising agents like Facebook)
My opponents had (effectively) infinite time and resources. They will forward their agenda relentlessly. Year after year. Non stop.
To "win", I had to show up EVERY SINGLE DAY for EVERY SINGLE BATTLE FRONT.
Well. One day I stayed home. After ten years of preventing internet voting (in my state), the legislature suspended the rules, fast-tracked the internet voting bill (no public hearings), and it passed unanimously.
I asked my representatives, who had previously committed to never passing such a bill, "WTF?"
"Well, we didn't hear any opposition."
(Fruit flies have longer attention spans.)
--
What I'm trying to say is that people do care. I traveled my entire state and had broad public support for my platform (use "citizen owned" open source software, protect voter privacy, universal voter registration). But we're outclassed, outgunned, and outmaneuvered.
You cannot expect anyone anywhere do The Right Thing.
But if you bring the heat, the powerful will see the light.
The only times I got my way is when I brought pressure. Build coaltions, fill public hearings, letters to the editors, endorsements, resolutions, orchestrate protests, etc.
This book is a very good primer.
http://www.becomingacitizenactivist.org
http://wellstone.orgIt looks that only Alaska has internet voting beyond corner cases (military and citizens abroad) whose votes don't get counted anyway except in statistically tied races.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/interne...
http://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5171&Year=2011
--
Aside: Our conservation district elections, which are self-administered (what could go wrong?), permit casting ballots online.
The counter (rock, paper, scissors) is to have an affirmative agenda.
If I had to do it all over, I would have pushed for comprehensive reform and an OSS stack. But young me wasn't very teachable.
The Election Verification Network is making all the right moves, in this regard. Strategy vs tactics, marathon vs sprint, coalition building, etc.
Might as well let AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Time-Warner get in on the google and facebook anti-privacy smorgasbord.
You assume these people care about "what is good for the people." Like CNN and MSNBC, claiming "R's say this, D's say this, I can't tell what the truth is!"
There is the record, there is history. One party is aligned with their corporate donors more than the other. While both have issues, on issues involving corporate power and influence, R's are clearly on the side of corporations and wealthy donors who keep them in power.
EDIT: there is no need for being fair because everyone else does this, but many times, D's end up being "republican-lite" because they believe it will appeal to R's and also appeal to their (the D's) donors; but there is no question as to which side the R's lie on.
* Republican prefers smaller government and prefers more conservative approach by eliminating regulations
* Democrats actually had all the major corporations' support during the 2016 election, but they try to appeal both sides, with more liberal agenda and mixing the corporation interest.
Don't forget each party is divided into:
* extreme conservative
* liberal
* conservative
of their own party's ideology.
Hah!
These people can't all live in the same bubble.
What's really weird is that Republicans love markets and hate regulation, but don't seem to realize that every market is created by regulation. There's a complete lack of nuance among vocal Republicans.
Without government, there can be no open markets.
Perhaps you're thinking of black markets.
No, they don't. They prefer consolidated power.
Electeds care about being reelected.
Voters vote based on identity.
"Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government"
If you want change, then you have to organize.
This is a claim, but rarely actually seen. More money is thrown at "defense", while less is put into supporting the American people.
What if we instead of building new fighter jets, we spent that money on fixing out infrastructure, getting faster internet to everyone's homes, better education for our children?
The military industrial complex in the US is structured such that every state and by extension Senator and Congressperson, wants to vote for things like new tanks and planes, because it creates/preserves jobs in their districts. But this has little long term benefit to their districts. Wouldn't it be better to invest that money into the future of their districts to improve the lives of the people there?
It's disingenuous to say the least the R's prefer smaller government. What they prefer is less regulation and redirection of tax money into corporations.
It's not even thrown well at defense. The army wanted to close certain bases and centralize others here in the U.S. It's not like the the army is entirely clueless about importance of operations. They figured they would be able to have the same capabilities, but lower staff and operation count. But you know what congressman/senator is going to allow job / industry to ship away from their district?
You get the same story in weapons and tech. They want to have fewer but more focused efforts when it comes to next-gen development. Same thing, but this time it's corp jobs in the district vs local army jobs.
They've each done a very good job at convincing people the other team is pure evil, though.
I'm not saying both parties don't have issues, but if people consistently voted for the person or party that was less evil, we'd eventually end up with good candidates. However, people like you throw up their hands and say "Oh, well, both sides are bad." Yeah, they are. Like too much salt and too much arsenic are both bad. But there are matters of degree here.
The Republicans that want to sell us all out to multinationals, ban religious minorities, and deny science are in power right now. The Democrats aren't perfect. If that's the bar they have to meet before people like you will stop saying "Well, both sides are bad, whaa, whaa, whaa" then whatever. But don't feel like you're smart because you see yourself as above the petty fray. Quite the opposite is true.
In the real world, one party is doing the right thing and protecting our privacy and one party isn't. It's not all propaganda.
why did Democrats enact the legislation that protected our privacy?
This pending rule change is not in effect at all yet; it was only put through 3 weeks after the 2016 election and wouldn't have taken effect until next December.
Had the Obama administration cared about privacy, they could have timed the rule change and the FTC authority removal to take effect at the same time.
[EDIT]: changed "a week before the 2016 election" (a different, significant rule change) to 3 weeks after.
Because it serves the interests of the tech companies that support democrats. Ask yourself why the FCC didn't make it illegal for everyone to profit off customers' private information.
They don't. The politicians who voted for this only represent the interests of the lobbyists and financial backers who 'donated/bribed' them during their campaign. Politicians don't care about the will of the people at all, several studies have shown this.
Before America can accomplish much of anything--we need real and substantial campaign finance reform. Too many corporations are able to influence elections and it's not good for democracy. I would think after this last election, democrats could run on this as a national security issue, if they were smart but no one has ever accused them of that.
Interesting. I was unaware studies had been done on this. Care to share any links?
0: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/poll-gop-trump-obamaca...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Until you took into account money. Then there was a correlation between what was passed and the 'will of the lobbyist'.
Really wish I could find that study again.
By coincidence, Planet Money recently did a podcast about automatically filling out tax returns in California:
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episo...
tl;dr: In a pilot, 99% of people preferred the auto-filled returns, but the bill to make it law failed by one vote, because of Intuit and Grover Norquist.
Before America can accomplish much of anything, we need a populace that will invest more into choosing a candidate than deciding who has the pithiest attack ad.
There's a hell of a lot of symptoms between us and the goal, and the current system seems to be doing everything it can to prevent us from reaching it (defunding education, defunding healthcare, preventing efforts to get out the vote, gerrymandering).
http://www.npr.org/2016/06/15/482150951/understanding-congre...
[] Two states have been admitted since 1912 - Alaska and Hawaii - but their borders match preexisting borders (the Alaska-Canada border was last altered in 1903).
Second, I don't understand how in a "no electoral college" universe, the concept of a "county" is even relevant. With every vote being perfectly equal, one would think the balance of power would perfectly equalize across all voters.
It wasn't voter suppression that caused this result, it was 5+M people more than in 2008 staying at home and not voting.
http://www.electproject.org/2008g http://www.electproject.org/2016g
I will also note that the poster you're replying to references gerrymandering as one of the causes of the election results not matching the votes; neither of your statements directly refute that.
http://www.npr.org/2016/06/15/482150951/understanding-congre...
As for gerrymandering, that only affects the House races, nothing else. The President isn't affected by that, only by the archaic and undemocratic Electoral College and the way state borders are drawn. The Senate is similar. The GOP swept all three.
It looks like the voter turnout was pretty average. Going back to 1972, the turnout numbers are similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St...
Thank you for the reminder about the limitations of gerrymandering!
Senate is 52-48 which doesn't seem like a sweep. This includes two independents which caucus with the Democrats. I think the Democrats actually picked up two seats, which doesn't seem like a sweep either. Also, in your previous comment, you said the GOP won some seats. Which seats were these?
Donald Trump had a victory margin in the bottom 10 of historical elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
Believe it or not, it's not a full-time job. Given that we've seen poll after poll showing that the average voter couldn't pass a 6th grade civics class, but I don't see how cutting education spending is the real problem. We spend plenty on education. If that were the root of the problem then the districts which spend the most money would have the best grades, but there's not a strong correlation there.
We spend money poorly, but we spend plenty. There are a lot of things that could improve the American education system, but one thing has been shown conclusively to not do any good on its own and that's spending more money.
If government can prevent people from rallying near a party convention, government can prevent people from bribing candidates for office.
I know what you mean (interchangeable?), and the problem is that it only goes one way. With money, you can purchase "free speech," e.g. in CA, you can pay signature gatherers a few million to put a proposition on the ballot, because signatures cost a couple bucks apiece. But you can't easily turn free speech into money: 100 million people could send nasty letters to the Koch brothers, and they'd be told to pound sand.
Campaign finance reform won't help this kind of thing. Just look at Dave Brat in Virginia; he won over Mark Cantor, despite Cantor being a long-time incumbent with a huge war chest and lobbyist backing and Brat being a little-known Tea Party candidate. Or just look at Trump: how much did he spend on campaigning? Virtually nothing. Hillary was the one spending obscene amounts of money on campaigning, and she was horribly unpopular and lost.
The problem isn't money, it's the voters.
Given enough money you can convince enough people of things like trickle down economics work, or climate change is a Chinese hoax. So indeed voters need to wise up( not going to happen IMHO ), we need to have less money in politics ( right ), or pigs could fly out my ass. I am just hoping that our AI overlords will be kind.
Campaign finance laws actually have significant influence on how much money can be spent, how transparent the funding must be, what money can be used for, etc. Media regulations also have a large impact.
A particular fringe world-view doesn’t just pop into significant numbers of voters’ minds out of nothing. It is deliberately tended and promoted by folks with large amounts of money with specific policy goals.
See e.g. this interview with Jane Mayer about Bob Mercer from yesterday, http://www.npr.org/2017/03/22/521083950/inside-the-wealthy-f...
Hate the game, not the players.
TL:DW - If I get to choose everyone you can vote for, does it matter how you vote?
1) it's not one person/group who's choosing who you can vote for. It's a product of the system as a whole, which has competing actors. The GOP does not decide who runs in the Dem races, and vice versa, for instance.
2) you're not as limited in who you vote for as you allege. There are always 3rd-party options. The only reason they never win is because no one votes for them because "they'll never win", a self-fulfilling prophecy, just like believing you'll never succeed and then never trying. If nothing else, voting 3rd-party shows that you cared enough to vote, and didn't like the 2 mainstream choices. If enough people vote that way, one of the 3rd parties will then get more recognition, matching funds, a place at the debates, etc. We've had FPTP voting since the very beginning, but we do NOT have the same political parties that we started out with.
How many people bothered showing up for Hillary's rallies? That's how you measure popularity and enthusiasm. Hillary didn't have any. People only voted for her because the alternative was viewed as worse.
In the (generally liberal) DC area that I live near, I saw almost no bumper stickers for Hillary. I actually saw far more bumper stickers for Obama than Hillary! Why would I see far more 4 or 8-year-old bumper stickers for Obama than for the current Dem candidate? Because she's unpopular, that's why.
Hillary ran against one of the most unpopular candidates in presidential election history, and she lost. Any other candidate would have easily won. Trump was an outsider, and deeply unpopular even among Republican voters. This should have been an easy election for the Dems to win, but they insisted on running the most unpopular, unpalatable candidate they possibly could have, and that's why they lost.
In the case of Trump, he IS one part of corporate America. He is benefiting himself and his slice of corporate America.
"Now, big corporations (the New York Times, etc.) are what stand between Trump and his agenda."
There are shades here, not as easy a statement to make as you have made.
While trump would definitely scare the American corps because of his protectionist, destabilising economic policy, the republican establishment is still behind a metric ton of the laws/bills etc that are bandied about, and they are corporate owned.
They still have the pockets of the politicians, they just don't like some of the other stuff. The weapons industry as a softball example would be jumping for joy at Trump.
So the corps are not standing between Trump and his agenda, but they definitely would have preferred a normal republican candidate.
Why do the majority of people not recognize this?
This was a straight party-line vote. There's a single party here working very hard to centralize and corporatize the internet. There's another party working against that.
I have to say I find it a bit hilarious when something like this happens and it's the result of a select, easily identifiable group and Americans then throw their hands up and declare, "The whole system is corrupt!"
I mean come on.
This raises the question: Have they set up the FTC to do this job before taking away responsibility from the FCC?
The White House seems to be full of people compromised to the Russians. But the voters are happy to have defeated the real enemy, their fellow Americans.
Today the Senate passed, with 50R in support, 46D and 2I opposing, 2R (including Rand Paul, a listed co-sponsor) abstaining, a very brief resolution [1]. The wording of the resolution is reproduced below:
JOINT RESOLUTION
Providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to "Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services".
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Congress disapproves the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to "Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services" (81 Fed. Reg. 87274 (December 2, 2016)), and such rule shall have no force or effect."
This undoes the 73-page publication [2] published on 2016-12-02 by the FCC, most of which took effect 2017-01-03, some parts later on 2017-03-02, both after the election and one of them after the inauguration.
I sympathize with what's at stake, but the victorious party's Senate issues a one-line rebuke of a sweeping ruleset coming out of the very tail end of the other party's lame duck session. While I support the Democratic position on this issue, I can't help but feel that the timing was a deliberate provocation timed to make the Republicans look bad. As entirely expected [3], this FCC ruling was indeed rebuked by the Senate and it now goes to the House, but the current FCC chair would've probably discontinued it under his leadership anyway.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/sjres34/BILLS-115sjres34p... [2] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/12/02/2016-28... [3] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/115-2017/s94
"the very tail end of the other party's lame duck session" -- not lame duck, this was in October, when Democrats were rather hopeful of electoral gains.
"the current FCC chair would've probably discontinued it under his leadership anyway." And in that case that would have been the news. This isn't about the horse race and whose-team-is-winning! It's about whether this situation is right or wrong.
You can do it yourself, but it's a big hassle, maybe someone finds this useful.
I use iVPN and can't stream Netflix while connected.
Maybe they do it to prevent anonymous attacks or something, I dunno, but it's quite annoying because they fail in very vague and unclear ways.
1. Where are you hosting it, and do you ever get blocked from certain services or websites?
2. How much does it cost? Is it a fixed cost, or bandwidth-dependent?
3. What do your down/up speeds look like when connected?
I host mine on a DigitalOcean instance. The Streisand installer (bash script + Ansible playbook) has a number of built-in deployment targets (Amazon, DigitalOcean, Google, Linode, and Rackspace at the time I did mine), and you can further select which region you want. It costs $5/mo, though there would be a cost for bandwidth overage if you hit your limit for the instance size.
I have not done a speed test on it as I have always been constrained by my local connection more than the server's end. I use it only when traveling at the moment.
If you want to see the open source of the router software itself, go to https://openwrt.org/ and dive in
Sometimes, the only way to make a whitelist is to see what's not working and add it to the list.
For the iptables box, I put a second 4 port intel pro 1000 nic in my normal host, ran a VM with PCI pass through so the VM controlled the nic and used that as a router.
I think there are purpose built routers out there that will do this but it will depend on the router on how you set this up. You'd have to do research on this. Pretty sure the ubiquity routers will let you do things like this. I've done similar on open-wrt.
As a massively inferior but better-than-nothing fallback, contractual agreements.
Otherwise, you can't.
Therefore routing across multiple independent networks (which is what a VPN is) actually does provide some additional privacy protection because it means that coordination between multiple entities is now required to see the same information that would have been available to one before, and it changes which entity with which economic interests can see the most.
Essentially, it's a competition hack. There is massive competition (and customer responsiveness) when you get close to the core, but very little for most people at the last mile. So a VPN allows you to shift you effective entry point to an arbitrary provider, and that can be quite helpful.
But assuming that AWS/DO, and their uplink providers (L3, etc) have the goal of selling reliable servers and internet, and aren't building up consumer ad profiles to sell me stuff/sell my data if it looks like one server or IP is maybe a VPN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
If you're already a Google user, use theirs - they are still part of the surveillance-entertainment complex, but at least they don't lie about DNS.
For shared HTTPS hosting (1 IP serving multiple domains), SNI (the domain) is sent in cleartext so the server can pick which configuration to use (SSL cert, etc). For sites that don't use SNI, they can still see you browsed there because without SNI, 1 IP = 1 domain.
I don't know the exact equipment and mechanisms used by ISPs today, but it's extremely likely that the surveillance works just based on sniffing every DNS packet, not just those sent to ISP resolvers.
Someone with a better knowledge of the current state of the art is invited to comment :)
I'd expect the ISP to know where their wires go though. Unless they're wireless.
Unless I'm missing something obvious, I don't really understand the general HN reaction here. I use https everywhere.
That's all they need.
In the case of the later, users at least have a choice to dump FB and use privacy respectful services. And FB collects what users do in regards to FB. With ISPs, not only they sit on the main pipe and can do deep inspection of all your traffic, users most often have no choice (at best a workaround like VPN, which isn't free and degrades performance). Crooks who voted for this must be same ones who advocate for police state.
In every sense this is worse than Facebook and others, especially considering your second paragraph.
I'll gladly sacrifice money and latency for privacy.
No.
More often than not, you'll get a hand-wavy and/or misleading answer.
AKA they would probably sell your dog to you if they thought they could get away with it.
It's quite unbelievable that you could try sending a bitstring over IP and have the ISP change that, legally. It's like USPS ripping up mail and occasionally adding some advertisements or rewriting your text.
"It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)", by Bob Dylan
So everyone should use VPNs. One can allow direct non-VPN access to particular sites, such as Netflix, in firewall rules.
https://www.flake.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2017/3/op-ed-f...
He says he just wants to go back to "the FTC’s successful sensitivity-based framework".
Is he wrong? Is it spin?
Jeff Flake is my senator and I honestly like him on so many issues. I'm very confused by this and trying to get to the bottom of it.
Edit: Oh, and Telecom Services was the largest donor industry to Flake's leadership PAC (not necessarily corruption, donors give money to politicians who already agree with them too).
https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?type=P&c...
still works on some versions of emacs (the default mac one anyway).
It was designed to throw off email surveillance, dated terms though. More details here: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ma...
Assuming ISPs start selling their costumer's browsing behaviors I imagine we'll soon see a "marketplace" for selling of this style of information. This could be a win for startups as now they will have an easy place to sell the types of information they collect about users who have signed up for their service.
It used to be a notion that "if you aren't paying for a service you are the product being sold".
Now you can start to assume that your usage of a service or even any program you install on your device will in effect result in information about you being sold.
There are cookie onboarding companies like LiveRamp, etc. that partner with companies and apps to load their cookie on login, map it to a hashed email, collect geo data, etc. and then resell that audience to these companies and advertisers to target/retarget against.
A surprising amount of that happens behind the scenes in apps where you'd have no reason to suspect they were doing that (the infamous "flashlight app requesting tons of permissions" is one example), and no real way of auditing it short of monitoring your traffic for calls to their servers.
I've heard rates around ~$8 CPM for each unique email-mapped user/mo (they pay you monthly even if it is the same user in Month 1 and Month 2 because the point is resetting the cookie that may have been previously wiped). Obviously various factors impact that pricing.
Adobe is also making big moves in that marketplace space for their Marketing Cloud [1].
[1] https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/aam/c_marke...
I guess we can expect worse than that now?
People forgot why privacy is important and why keeping records is very dangerous and shouldn't be carelessly, if at all, unless there is a genuine need for it.
Unfortunately, and I resent having to say this, I think humanity will need a new lesson before things can get better.
There is no way to avoid this.
The way the internet works right now, someone at some point has to know which server you want to connect to. It's your ISP or your VPN provider or the TOR nodes you're connected to, or some other lesser-known program that obfuscates your identity.
So wait, are these new rules that would have gone into effect, or is this repealing old existing rules?
What if bills could only implement 100% of what they say after receiving 100% of the vote? And if a bill splits 50/50 (as this one roughly did), the rule could be: tough, now you may only implement 50% of what you asked for; what will that 50% be?
It should be obvious by now that the political party system tends to produce results that consider approximately 2 viewpoints instead of those of 100 senators or a million constituents. And it should be equally obvious that the election of representatives pretty much hands four years worth of arbitrary bills to the majority, counter-arguments be damned apparently.
We all want to perceive our political views as the result of deep, personal thought--reflection on our own moral guidance, our own observations about the world, our knowledge of the law. Or some combination of those things. We don't want to think that our political views are determined by something as arbitrary as where we grew up.
But I think that we are, in fact, shaped more by our environments than we want to think we are. I grew up on a small farm in Texas. My parents happened to be university professors, so I had access to decent education and placed some value on the arts. In fact, I was a professional violinist for 20 years before I got into software engineering and data science.
My working theory is based solely on my observations, and I haven't done a study to try to support this theory, but I am working on getting the funding to do such a study in a rigorous way.
It's this: the primary driver of political philosophy is access to property. When you have access to cheap, functional property, you tend to lean Republican. When you don't, you tend to lean Democrat.
The reasoning behind this is pretty simple. When you live in a place like Texas, you don't really need other people's rules. If you don't like the rules in your city, it's pretty cheap to go buy some land with little-to-no oversight from anyone and live your life as you please, so long as you aren't being really obnoxious.
So you have to drive 2 hours to work instead of an hour? No big deal. Your freedom to live under your own rules is more important than that. Why would anyone compromise on their way of doing things when it's so easy to not compromise? It doesn't make any sense.
Contrast that to NYC, where I've been living for almost 2 years. Everything is about compromise. Very few people can afford to just move to a place where no one cares--for a variety of reasons. You can't live in that kind of a dense population without accepting limitations to your freedoms. And you want those limitations in place because people are jackasses. So you agree to curtail what you are allowed to do so that you have some confidence that other people are similarly curtailed. There's a sort of minimum viable level of human decency that gets enforced.
If you think of personal freedom in the sense that it ends when it starts to infringe on the personal freedom of another person, it makes sense that you are going to have more of it if there's no one near you for 10 miles vs. your next door neighbor living in what used to be the second toilet in your apartment.
I don't see much of a conceptual problem with either attitude. I'm much happier in NYC than I ever was in Texas. Texas just doesn't have a whole lot to offer to a liberal, atheist, violinist, and software engineer.
What I see as a problem is that people are incapable of understanding the different needs of different human situations and want to impose their own ideas on populations they do not understand at all.
New Yorkers grow up riding the subway to school. They see all kinds of people from all walks of life and all different races from a very young age. I didn't even meet a black person until I was in college. New Yorkers don't understand how the south can be so racist. I can understand it. I don't condone it at all. But I can understand how it happens. We still have housing laws that allow what's basically racial segregation in Texas and all across the South.
We have Senators and Supreme Court Justices from New York City who don't have a clue about how utterly different things are 2,000 miles away trying to enforce the compromises they absolutely need on the entire country. And conversely, we have idiots from Texas pretending that places like NYC, LA, SF, Chicago and other high-density populations just don't exist--pretending that anyone who doesn't want to compromise is completely free to just go someplace else.
Both sides of the aisle are completely fucked in the head. They are wrong. There is no universal set of rules that make sense in both the context of sparse population/cheap land/driving culture and dense population/expensive land/walking or pub trans culture.
To bring it back to something relevant to this particular conversation, I think you can apply this heuristic to the Senate, FCC, and FTC.
As parties, yes. Both of the big ones are owned by corporate interests. That's clear. But they are owned by the ones they want to be owned by. The ones that they think are in alignment with their political philosophy.
The Republican version of the story on privacy and net neutrality is that everyone has space to move to something else if they don't like it. Let the companies do what they want, and if users don't like it, they can go do something else. Which would be reasonable if Republicans weren't already in the pockets of all the major providers and have made it impossible for there to be another place to "move" to, in terms of internet providers.
The Democrats did, unfortunately, almost nothing to protect users. The Democrats are too willing to compromise to get something done.
In my opinion, it's the will/won't compromise that is fundamentally derived from the geography of where you live that is driving our politics now, including the politics of the internet. Republicans win because they don't compromise. It's not in their vocabulary. Democrats lose because they are, by nature, the compromise party.
In a perfect world, both sides would get out of their shells and try to experience the places other people live. They would realize that one-size-fits-all compromise legislation does not, in fact, work for everyone all the time. And it can't really.
But there are some cases that affect everyone equally: bottom 1%, top 1%, anything in between, the internet matters. This is one of the rare few instances where Republicans and Democrats should be holding hands and applying rules equally across the board.
Those rules should be in favor of privacy and neutrality. No compromise, no matter where you are from or where your political philosophies came from. Net Privacy should be absolute by law as should Neutrality from the providers. That's all there is to it.
In the absence of that, I see a good market opportunity for a social network like Facebook that is entirely encrypted and unscannable by the Intelligence Community. Totally private. No ads. You pay a dollar a month for this. Your data is yours, and you can leave at any time and take it with you in a reasonable format.
I'm already working on that. Ping me if you are interested.
Very bad.
The only thing that might leak is the final public IP address.
With all the allegations and lying we read about this current administration, there is no sanity neither at the White House nor on the Capital Hill. I never like the fact Senate election is every six years. There should also be a fixed term for all representatives and senators.
(Disclaimer: do not support Trump, but not Democrat / Republican, both parties are dirty in their own way).
If one day voters are given a secure voting application they can vote on all issues, it will be great.
With current winner take all voting structures in the US, this isn't exactly an option. Winner-take-all voting systems end up with only two parties, because that is the only viable way to win.
What we need is ranked choice voting so that voters are not penalized for supporting third and fourth options.
> If one day voters are given a secure voting application they can vote on all issues, it will be great.
I'm not sure I share your confidence in that. A representative government has it's positives, such-as people who are dedicated to govern while we all work, etc. And with only 50% turn out, or less, you'd get a skewed populous actually voting on these things.
Perhaps if their job is more about explaining and convincing people, and we hold the keys voting, then perhaps the power will indeed back to us. Again, ideal, I don't know how effective it will ever be.
to be fair, I have this instinct sometimes but at a certain point the ways in which their "dirtiness" might be similar becomes less interesting/relevant than the ways in which one party is actively attempting to dismantle the government, and doing so from a place of transparent incompetence.
Or fine, if you don't agree with that even, my point is simply why just hand-waive that it's the same. Let's discuss if the republicans have moved too close to facism without mentioning the democrats who are out of power and aren't a factor in this particular topic.
Now the fascism part we're seeing that actually move forward in real time, so you get half a point.
Had Sanders been elected, I am confident we would be talking about the marxist administration instead of the fascist administration. Hillary? Not so much.
Just what is marxist about his platform?
You'll never stop the corruption until the power is taken away, i.e., more carefully checked and balanced, and where appropriate, cut back.
Everything should be controlled at the smallest, most local level possible, not the largest.
I don't believe this. I know too many democrats who believe that the 2nd amendment is obsolete and that guns should not be owned by civilians (or even normal police officers).
> Most Democratic proposals have been along the lines of stricter background checks.
Right, because that is the maximum amount of legislation that is even possible to get passed. Outright ban of guns would get shot down (so to speak) from the outset. If and when stricter background check legislation passes, will Democrats rest easy on gun issues? No. They will introduce more and more, progressing inch by inch until our gun laws are similar to UK or Japan.
Do you have a source for this or are you speculating?
Yeah I have a source - Maryland. The bluest state, posterboy of the Democratic platform. We have the strictest gun laws in the country, and the Democrats are never happy. 3 years ago we had significant new restrictions introduced to restrict gun ownership, way more restrictive than any other state. It's all but impossible for normal civilians to get CCP and Maryland does not respect CCPs of any other state.
no Democrats want to take away any guns.
Once set, the EPA budget is untouchable? That seems like a terrible way to run government. I'm not for or against the budget cut, but I don't think anything should be off-limits.
>do not support Trump
You don't say....
>If one day voters are given a secure voting application they can vote on all issues, it will be great.
I think you'd be surprised for how many people "internet privacy" is completely and utterly irrelevant to their daily struggles.
It isn't just the internet privacy, but everything else.
No, but you did say "Who in the right mind would propose cutting EPA budget". I would think about it, as I hope my elected officials would.
>but 31% is a lot. Perhaps they need to convince me their cutting will yield to better spending
This is fair.
> This current government.
> both parties are dirty in their own way
one of those ways seems more troubling, though.
And supporters for both ways feel the same way you do, so, guess what? nothing truly changes.
See the recent election: we got a radical new Administration, plus a huge crop of new GOP politicians. From your stance on the EPA and health care, I assume that you do not favor the GOP.
If we had a 2-year term for Senators like we do the House, then we would have even more GOP politicians in the Senate than we do now, because this time around we had a big GOP sweep. Is that really what you want?
The whole point of the Senate having a 6-year term (and them not being popularly elected before the 18th Amendment) was to keep the federal government from having wild swings in leadership due to short-term political trends. In engineering terms, it's supposed to be a longer feedback loop, to prevent wild oscillations and instability.
Having fixed terms doesn't help; then you get pols who are for sale to the highest bidder because they can't make a career out of government. If you like the EPA and single-payer health care, then Bernie Sanders is probably to your liking. He's been in Congress for several decades now. You want to force people like that out?
Finally, letting voters vote on all issues is a terrible way to run government. If you put internet privacy on the ballot, how do you think people would vote? Why do you assume they'll agree with you? Advertising campaigns by the media can easily convince them that these rules simply increase their costs and are "bad for competition" or somesuch BS. In fact, they'll probably put a similar-looking proposition on the ballot which actually does the opposite of what it appears to. We see this all the time in states with ballot propositions; there'll be 2 props on the ballot, one which is the "good" one, and one which is put there by some industry which hates the good one and sounds good if you don't look at it too closely, and is designed to generate FUD. The whole reason we have professional legislators is because normal people don't have the time or education to handle all these issues; that's why we outsource it to "experts", except in our case the experts are corrupt hacks.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13942925 and marked it off-topic.
So Obama stopped the NSA mass collection program during its administration?
Sorry, I'd have to agree. "Both sides do it" is an easy platitude, but Democrats aren't trying to teach the Bible in schools, that Evolution is a lie, that Climate Change is a lie, that wealth trickles down, that more of the "free market" can somehow solve our gigantic healthcare problem, that smoking doesn't kill, that abortion is murder but somehow women who have one shouldn't go to jail for it, that there's no such thing as a wall between church and state, oh wait--Islam?! Yes there's definitely a wall between Islam and state; that keeping guns regulation free makes us all safer, the list goes on.
I'd agree the left has some problems and they do the same emotional manipulating just to get votes. But they also just happen to be manipulating people about issues that are mostly factually supported.
YEAs ---50
R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R
NAYs ---48
D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D I D D D D D D D D D D D D I D D D D D D D D D D D
Not Voting - 2
R R
(https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...)
Yes: 50 Republicans
No: 46 Democrats and 2 independents
Abstentions: 2 Republicans
edit: tx fjert!
I think you meant 46 Democrats and 2 Independents.
One day... if we can overcome our deeply set ideologies...
Even if they held only 4 seats, would change the entire political landscape.
Breaking the dialectic stranglehold the two party system has on this country would be the benefit. Nothing's perfect, but multiparty gives the system more diverse voices, more opportunity for people to choose and think for themselves.
Libertarianism that Ron Paul was pushing in 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries was worth considering (and I personally would love if the guy won), but notice how he had to choose one of the two major parties to get noticed, just like Trump did in the last cycle and other non-mainstream candidates did before them.
We have First Past The Post voting and Duverger's Law says as a result we will have two real parties.
Unfortunately, I've yet to acquire a good handle on the real world impact such alternatives would bring. Does anyone know of analysis that looks at how countries that have implemented these systems have benefitted?
strong agreement on what we can do to improve it.
Change the way your state votes away from FPTP to a preferential voting system.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Comparison_of_Schulze...
https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2016/11/10/maine-became...
Of course, we may also need to consider the notion that the voting system is only a minor problem compared to other aspects of our governance model.
It makes quite a lot of sense as a downside in limited, party based voting situations. IE, if you were an independent in a theoretical senate where 50 republicans, 50 democrats and you were to vote on a party-line proposition.
If non-dictatorship were being violated, you'd know. The non-dictatorship criterion states that the following situation is impossible:
- Out of all the voters, there is one in particular, who we'll call K.
- The election outcome is always identical to whatever K voted, no matter what anyone else voted.
So, if it isn't possible that a single person ranked candidate A first, the rest of the country ranked candidate B first, and the election nevertheless ranked candidate A first, then the election system does not violate the non-dictatorship criterion.
With that in mind, I am totally confused as to the point you're trying to make? The reason we don't worry about dictatorship is that we don't use systems that exhibit it, not that we have one but nobody knows who it is.
The result is that Arrow's theorem itself isn't a rebuttal, as per my first point, and discussion should center around the other two elements of Arrow's theory. Specifically whether or not they are, in practice, worse than our current situation.
Which they aren't. So why trot out Arrow's theorem for the 90th time?
This is an error on your part. Your example does not violate non-dictatorship; the rules of the election permit anyone to vote against their party registration.
Arrow's theorem is about the design of elections, not predictions about how people will vote in practice.
FPTP is by far worse than any preferential vote count.
FPTP will literally throw your vote away if you do not vote for one of the two perceived """"popular"""" parties.
It will also "literally throw your vote away" if you do vote for one of the two perceived "popular" parties. This is an old observation.
And yet, interest groups that vote continue to get better results than interest groups that don't.
Given this, there is an argument for both parties wanting this so that they could potentially have more power in areas where they do not now...
You can do literally anything. Saying "it's impractical" is just you getting in your own way.
Otherwise any kind of voting system is similar to your monthly vote on budget, where you, your spouse and your 4 kids have an equal right to vote. In such situation, you endup with unpaid bills, utilities shut down, bunch of candy and newest set of playstation games.
Clearly the US healthcare system is all screwed up. Its astonishing that the richest country in the world can't provide basic healthcare to all its citizens. The US spends far more on health than any other country, yet the life expectancy of the American population is not longer but actually shorter than in other countries that spend far less. https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life-expectancy-...
That's clearly bad for many Americans. Yet... America's problem is the rest of the world's gain. Countries that don't have the US's structural problems can benefit from the US's enormous medical research outcomes, without their broken healthcare system.
The two party electoral system is the same. There's been a steady move to more proportional representation systems in other democracies around the world. Yet the US persists with a divisive, broken system.
Yet... if the US got its act together and looked outwards instead of inwards, it would be a fiercer competitor to other countries. So while it certainly looks from the outside to be somewhat insane the way the US political system works, maybe it holds the US back and helps others outside - keeping the world a bit balanced, since the US holds many other competitive cards such as immense scale, vast access to capital, etc.
Its possible to look at a lot of the recent developments a bit like this - perhaps bad for the US domestically, perhaps good for the world as a whole.
So net neutrality is going to get undermined? That's bad for the American consumer, for sure. But maybe if its bad for pure internet companies also, then it might be good for their offshore competitors.
If one offers you ice cream more often than the other, that doesn't make them "less bad". Chemotherapy is "less bad" than cancer, but most folks generally don't want to have either.
Both parties are self-serving.
Both parties have supported the surveillance state.
Both parties ignore their constituents when convenient.
Both parties have promoted legislation that they themselves are exempt from.
"Less bad" is a red herring. What's better, a shit sandwich or a sandwich with 90% less shit in it? Partisans will try to convince you that any sandwich will have shit in it, and their particular sandwich's shit is barely noticeable and actually good for you if you were smart enough to realize it.
But your systemic critique bypasses the obvious point that ideologically, there are great differences between the major American political parties on this issue.
Denouncing the system as "all shit" does nothing to change this fact.
Yes, the principle being: if the other guys are for it, we're against it. Just like the Republicans.
You can argue for individuals standing on principle, such as Ron Wyden (D-OR). But he was a standout in his own party when it came to re-authorizing the Patriot Act in 2011. Likewise, in the same party you have Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who is a major proponent of mass surveillance.
No, the Democrats are not magically immune to corruption or self-service. There is no Democrat Exceptionalism here.
Also bringing up the Patriot act is dishonest, that's a national security issue, while this is a consumer privacy one. These types of things intersect, they're still different concepts and different bills.
A FISA warrant to get my information? Fine, I accept that. There's oversight and every nation needs security and has processes in place to ensure it, flawed as it is. Handing my info to every shady marketer and social media company? No.
edit: Rand Paul is listed as a cosponsor on the bill.
edit: Oh I see, you voted for a republican senator but not necessarily a republican president.
[1] https://randpaul.com/issues
[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/rand-paul-wraps-up-nsa-filibuste...
I tweeted to Rand Paul to clarify his standing on S.J.Res.34 and I hope he will. The US citizens should e-mail/call Rand and others and demand statements as this is being overshadowed by Obamacare repeal/Ryancare introduction bill.
Please stop pushing the false narrative that if only everyone voted, the kleptocracy would grind to a halt. It's culturally entrenched at this point.
You are one voice in three hundred million. So is everybody else. Please vote.
If maybe there weren't swing states, the outcome would have been different. The system is set up this way for a reason - so that people like you can tell people like me that if they only voted, things would be fixed. Maybe they would, but, like I said, my vote doesn't count, so I can't really vote for it, can I? :)
There has to be a better way to run this "democracy" we were born into, and that change has to start with us; the entrenched politicians won't dare change it on their own.
Entrenched politicians aren't going to change things on their own, but it's a false to assume that that means they are going to change things for anyone who can't threaten their hegemony.
My state is not a swing state. My representatives are both solidly entrenched and also on the take. In terms of federal issues, my vote will never count here.
So get the word out in your community and change that fact. If you want change, be the spark.
It is beyond me that, given that my vote doesn't count in the presidential election (due to electoral college rules), and my local representatives are entrenched, due to division of the representation, how things will 'sort themselves out' if I just faithfully go to the polls every time.
I apologize if it seems I don't take your frustration and discouragement seriously because I truly do, I feel it too. My point in it all is that going to the polls is the least one can do. Even better is encouraging some friends to engage with you because 10 votes is surely better than one.
Could you explain what has that got to do with me, and the fact that my vote doesn't count, for the reasons I've outlined above?
The outcome for my state was decided before I got to the polling place.
The outcome of the election is specifically designed to value my vote as less than that of someone in a smaller, rural state.
The candidates I got to vote for were selected for me, through corruption and subterfuge. I've read the emails of party officials working together to foment hatred between their own supporters out of whole cloth.
So, no, even though I voted, my vote didn't count. Never counted.
But at the end of the day what matters is who gets out to vote. Your state's outcome was decided not by fate, but by people who vote. Count yourself among them.
I'm afraid that this sounds to me too much like the political equivalent of 'do what you love and the money will follow'; based in faith, rather than evidence.
Yes, the two party system and electoral college should be fixed. Changing the voting system will probably involve people voting to change it.
Ah, no. I have to abide by the result of the vote.
Except that my vote counts less than others due to the electoral college, and party officials colluded to smear my voting sector and prevent the candidate I wanted to vote for from even appearing on the ballot.
So, no, my vote never counted.
Have you forgotten Debbie Wasserman Schultz being thrown in front of the bus? Did you miss Donna Brazile denying giving debate questions to HRC, only later call it something she would "forever regret", while then, in another situation continuing to deny that she did it?
And OMG, someone told Clinton that there would be a question about Flint's drinking water during a debate held in Flint, Michigan. You'd have to have ESP to predict that.
Listen, I wanted Bernie too. I cast my primary ballot for him as well. But clearly more registered members of the Democratic Party wanted Clinton. She was more popular than Bernie among Democrats.
As long as we have First Past the Post voting [0], we will be stuck with whatever candidates those two parties choose to offer us. We will not be able to use our votes to elect candidates who accurately reflect our political will - we will only be able to choose the lesser evil out of the options presented to us.
The political discontent arising from Trump's election and presidency should be used to change our voting system to something that doesn't suffer from Duverger's Law [1] or the Spoiler Effect [2], and that will allow the outcomes of elections to closely map the range and number of actual political opinions - i.e., something that makes electoral results accurately reflect the real will of the people.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect
I do think we need radical reforms if we want the ship to not sink, though, so I don't feel that encouraging people to vote, without urgently arguing that voting reform is necessary, is deeply meaningful.
On another current HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13939645), a Show HN about a tool for interactively modeling dynamic systems, I followed the tool's author back to their website, and found a really great interactive blog post about Building a Better Ballot [0]. I'm going to be spreading that around as much as I can; it seems to me the best tool/post for really understanding the various voting methods and some of their flaws. I hope you'll check it out and share it, if you also like it. (I'm in no way affiliated with the author or tool, for the record; just impressed by it.)
Once again though, we the people lose and the Democrats/Republicans win.
We are in a discussion thread talking about an instance where the US government voted to essentially remove all privacy protections for Americans, and it was completely down party lines. Every Democrat voted against it. Every single one. Nearly every single Republican voted for it except for a couple with some principles -- e.g. Paul, who most Republican politicians would love to get rid of and mostly ignore.
I don't really like Obama admin views on domestic spying either, but government spying for "national security" reasons with FISA warrants is quite far away from "free-for-all, all of your most personal and private history is now available to the highest bidder". While I disagree with both, I can see the nuance there, and so can the 48 Democratic and Independent senators.
Edit: Sorry, it's 50-48, even closer. Here's the list of cosponsors, not a single D. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-joint-re...
10 Repeating flawed logic to yourself does not make it true. 20 GOTO10.
They put 0 effort into their analysis, they're just rote repeating a cynics trope that makes them feel smart and superior to the process.
It's difficult, after all, to educate yourself on the issues and respect the differences between the parties. It's difficult and complicated and messy to dig into the details and realize the differences.
Why do the work? It's far easier to be a cool hipster cynic and rote repeat out the standard script: "Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same party" "There's no differences"