Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

I am a strong advocate for privacy, please understand that before you continue reading this. I don't want ISPs to sell my browsing history, and I am continually disappointed in the Republican opposition to net neutrality and online privacy. I'm even working on an open source project involving cryptography and secret protection, so I have skin in the game.

However, this headline is patently false, right? Congress didn't sell anything. They removed protections that were put into place late last year and hadn't gone into effect as far as I know.

Just because companies are legally capable of selling your browsing data doesn't mean that they absolutely will. As far as I know, my browsing history hasn't been sold by my ISP yet, and the regulations that were rolled back were not the reason why this is true.

Maybe I'm just posting because I like being a contrarian, but I do expect a more sober-minded commentary on this site than I've been getting on some recent news items.

If you're interested in the FCC's response, here is a primary source[0]. I don't buy most of it - I know that this is a lot of spin doctoring, particularly that second paragraph. But it provides insight to how the FCC is viewing this, something I haven't seen a lot of in this coverage.

Here[1] is some coverage from 2015 on the FCC/FTC issue that the third paragraph in that presser talks about. Also worth noting is this HN thread[2] from two years ago, where the top comment is a thoughtful critique of putting the hopes of an open Internet in the hands of a bureaucracy. People didn't agree, but that's the sort of commentary that keeps me coming back to Hacker News.

[0]: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017... [1]: https://iapp.org/news/a/ftc-officials-concerned-about-jurisd... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9191007

AT&T had a program in place ("Internet Preferences") where they offered a $29/mo discount on their gigapower FTTH offering to customers who allowed them to inspect traffic for the purpose of ad targeting, including sending you offers by e-mail related to your browsing.

They defaulted you in to the program, hid its terms in fine print, and made it difficult to sign up for service w/o accepting the program.

Now, they did away with this program late last year and started giving everyone the discounted price. It's not clear why they did so: maybe it was the upcoming FCC regulations; maybe it wasn't making enough money; maybe it was competition from Google Fiber.

With Google Fiber going away and the FCC regulations being rolled back, I'll guess we'll see whether the program comes back.

But regardless, at least one major ISP was willing to inspect its customers' browsing data and use it for ad targeting. It would be great if this were solved by the market via customer backlash, but I don't see that happening. Sadly, I think most customers just don't care. People are willing to tolerate a lot to save money.

However, this headline is patently false, right? Congress didn't sell anything. They removed protections that were put into place late last year and hadn't gone into effect as far as I know.

It's nearly impossible to find even one constituent who wrote to their Congresspeople asking for this law to be axed. It was a handful of lawmakers in Congress who accepted bribes, payments[1], and other kinds of lobbying from telecoms to push this through... that is the definition of "selling". And yes, the votes did happen almost exactly down party lines.

The headline was taken directly from the NYT article, and it is indeed accurate. That HN changed it to appease ??? is really disconcerting.

[1]http://www.vocativ.com/415350/house-rep-pushing-to-set-back-...

Given that it's illegal for corporations to donate to candidates, I find your reference rather suspect.

I know that you know campaign finance is more nuanced than that.

It's perfectly legal for a corporation to donate to a Super PAC supporting candidate's reelection efforts.

And they're adding donations from individuals in the industry.

I find it dishonest for an article to say that corporations donated to a candidate, when they actually mean that a corporation donated to a PAC or that employees donated to a candidate. It creates an extremely misleading picture. Telecoms are major employers in places like Tennessee (which Blackburn represents). AT&T alone has 5,600 employees in Tennessee (more than Twitter has employees total). It's no surprise telecom employees donate to her.

Many of the people who voted "no" on the bill received similar amounts of money from Internet companies: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.php?cycle=2016.... Are all those votes suspect?

>Are all those votes suspect?

No because those representatives didn't vote in a way that favors the companies that donated. If I bribe 10 politicians and 4 of them don't do what I want, does that that mean the other 6 who did are now above suspicion as well?

Voting in a way that favors a company that donates money to your political campaign creates at the very least an appearance of a conflict of interest. In those cases we should rightly be suspicious.

>I find it dishonest for an article to say that corporations donated to a candidate, when they actually mean that a corporation donated to a PAC

Do you find it dishonest when an article says a corporation donated to a candidate, when actually they mean that a corporation donated to a candidate's campaign?

A candidate only personally benefits from campaign donations insofar as they help them get reelected--the same way they benefit from PACs.

There isn't much distinction at this point because PACs routinely operate as extensions of campaigns, even though they are technically prohibited from coordinating. It doesn't stop them from doing things like winking and putting up random video clips with no audio on the campaign websites that PACs can just happen to download to make advertisements with.

>or that employees donated to a candidate

I agree that this is a little more misleading.

>AT&T alone has 5,600 employees in Tennessee

That's true, but my guess is that most of the money that was donated from employees of the telecom industry came from a much smaller number of high level employees donating near the maximum.

> No because those representatives didn't vote in a way that favors the companies that donated.

They certainly did. The Internet consists of server owners, content owners, and pipe owners. You can understand pretty much every political issue involving the Internet as a proxy war between these groups for advertising and media viewing dollars. Here, keeping pipe owners out of the advertising business directly benefits server owners.

If they take money from a company like Google that stands to benefit from more FCC regulation, I have a problem with that as well. I can dislike two things at the same time.

Allowing unlimited spending in the form of Super PACs just exacerbates your proxy war problem. In this case we have several companies with deep pockets that happen to be on the side of net neutrality, but their interests won't always align with the public's.

I see where your argument is coming from. Lobbyists give money to politicians who push legislation that favors lobbyists. In a sense that could be construed as a 'sale'.

But if we accept that premise, even in that case the only thing that was sold was the potential to infringe on privacy, not privacy itself.

Congressional Republicans don't own my privacy.

They can certainly make it easier for me to protect my privacy and have possibly made it harder after this vote, but they never owned it.

Yes, I don't think you should take the headline that literally - there's a touch of abstraction there. More literally, Congressional Republicans sold telcos a convenient legal avenue to violate your privacy. They didn't "possibly" make it harder... they added a massive new burden to your life if you care about your privacy. Read the other comments in this thread -- see how complex and incomplete the countermeasures seem to be, even for techies?

There are many ways the government protects your privacy such that you don't have to worry about it in X scenario. The Republicans sold one of those protections and added a new scenario to the list of things you have to worry about. The headline is pretty appropriate in context.

Don't have a moment to read your sources at the moment.

But weren't the protections only put into place last year because they weren't needed until then?

In other words, they were under the jurisdiction of the FTC previously, so this particular legislation a moot point, because the FTC could just say "hey, you can't do that. case closed."

Now because of the "common carrier exemption" I don't think that would hold up.

This was useful in some quick tidbits about FTC + FCC relationship, previous responsibilities, and current. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...

Funny enough, they talk about how the FCC handles data/privacy breaches, and how they came down really hard on a minor breach that affected a few cox subscribers, nothing with payment data or even any actual damages.

This seemingly means that the FTC takes privacy seriously. But congress won't let them.

If legal opinion is now that the FTC does not have the ability to regulate internet privacy, it is not the fault of congress, it is the fault of the 9th circuit's ruling ruling last year [1], which has effect over its area of jurisdiction.

Traditionally it is the FTC which regulates consumer privacy. The republican's position w.r.t. internet privacy is that regulating this is in the domain of the FTC, as has always been the case before [2][3][4].

Sources:

[1] https://iapp.org/news/a/the-att-v-ftc-common-carrier-ruling-...

[2] http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...

[3] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/protecting-c...

[4] http://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/the-ftc...

They rolled back the FCC's privacy rules. They did not restore the FTC's privacy rules. Best to pay attention to the things they do rather than the things they say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com