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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

As amusing as it would be, the ISPs are only permitted to sell aggregate anonymized data, not anything personally-identifiable (as per the 1984 Cable Act).

They wouldn't get actual Google or Bing searches as neither company would sell those on - I imagine at most they'd get top-lists of DNS resolutions in a given geographical area, possibly with some demographic data thrown in - still valuable data for some marketers though, but unlikely to be anything juicy.

I wonder if any ISPs would sell that data for any price, given the risk of backlash.

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> ISPs are only permitted to sell aggregate anonymized data, not anything personally-identifiable (as per the 1984 Cable Act).

remember how that worked out with AOL search logs?

What are you referring to?

https://www.cnet.com/news/aols-disturbing-glimpse-into-users...

> ISPs are only permitted to sell aggregate anonymized data

Anonymising data is hard [1]. Competence with such anonymization and de-anonymization might negatively correlate with support for this bill. If so, the offense has the advantage.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets-liv...

Even if they were permitted to sell individual data, just because an act may allow them to doesn't mean it compels them to.

ISPs and advertising agencies have invested heavily into lobbing for this. The amount of money they'd make off of it is going to be more than this campaign could possible raise.

Top DNS resolutions of white men 50 and older from the Capitol Hill region of DC would probably still be an interesting read.

It would still just be ANY queries for cpsc.gov.

Wait, what? This one?

(2) A cable operator may disclose such information if the disclosure is— (A) necessary to render, or conduct a legitimate business activity related to, a cable service or other service provided by the cable operator to the subscriber;

If the cable service has another service that delivers ads, why wouldn't that be acceptable?

You're right, it's never going to be that you PayPal your ISP $25 and get someone's network history (though I may regret those words in a decade).

But, "Sell" is different than "Act" on though, right?

If I'm an ISP, my number one job tomorrow is going to be setting up some sort of software bridge that interacts with current real time bidding ad tech software to better target ads.

Expect the number of "ads that follow you around the Internet" to spike considerably, and be utterly resistant to things like clearing out your local browser cookies, PrivacyBadger, etc.

Not resistant to uBlock Origin

As /u/fjdlwlv said, uBlock Origin will make sure work of that, plus if you're serious about blocking this stuff, pi-hole (https://pi-hole.net) will again add an extra layer of loveliness to your ad-network blocking capabilities.

Now throw a VPN on top of all this (and THEN work on the problems with policy, people)...

EDIT: missing words EDIT 2: URL

deanonymization is no big deal; At 33c3 they bought data, deannonymized to find a EU politician and confronted her with it.

https://youtu.be/VhVpMPkFUI8?t=103

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