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You have one day to stop Congress from giving away your web browsing history


homersapien

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Such bull**** that the Republicans are supporting this.  I've already given Shelby and Strange and earful and have emailed my congressional rep.  

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http://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/3/28/15089396/house-republican-privacy-bill

Congressional Republicans just voted to let ISPs sell your browsing history to advertisers

In a party-line 215 to 205 vote, the House of Representatives has approved legislation to allow internet service providers to sell information about their customers’ web browsing histories to advertisers and other third parties. The legislation has already been passed by the Republican-controlled Senate, so it is now headed to President Donald Trump’s desk for his signature.

“We are one vote away from a world where your ISP can track your every move online and sell that information to the highest bidder,” wrote Kate Tummarello of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that advocates for online privacy rights, ahead of today’s vote.

The bill overturns regulations the Federal Communications Commission passed in the waning months of the Obama administration. Those regulations, explained in detail by Ars Technica, required ISPs to get approval from their customers before they could sell information about what websites they visit to third parties.....

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These companies have rights too.  They are people, after all.  If you do not like this,,,,do not use their internet.  We do not need the government to regulate private enterprise. Private enterprise is better than government.   

 

 

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Scary that you can list 99% of all ISPs in one sentence.  Must not be enough FCC regulation.

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Last one for the night and I am not defending the Reps at all. Let them burn. 

BUT, they were already more or less selling our info thru social media. The ISP's are worse no doubt, but the damage was already being done

 

This version of the Republican party, the one completely sold out to ALL MONEY & NO INTEGRITY is amazing in their shamelessness.

Teddy Roosevelt has to be ready to rise back from the grave...WTH happened to the Republican Party?

 

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8 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

Last one for the night and I am not defending the Reps at all. Let them burn. 

BUT, they were already more or less selling our info thru social media. The ISP's are worse no doubt, but the damage was already being done

 

This version of the Republican party, the one completely sold out to ALL MONEY & NO INTEGRITY is amazing in their shamelessness.

Teddy Roosevelt has to be ready to rise back from the grave...WTH happened to the Republican Party?

 

The difference is, I can enjoy the internet without ever using Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or any other social media.  I don't have to use any Google services whatsoever.  But most places have one, maybe two internet providers.  It's one thing to allow a store that has a location on one of the streets to sell my info.  I don't have to drive there and give it to them if I don't want to.  But it's damn hard to get anywhere if I can't use the roads without allowing them to pimp me out to God knows who.  In this scenario, the social media are the storefronts, the ISPs own the roads.  It's just not the same thing.

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We are gnat straining here. There are three-four levels, or more, of tracking out there.

1) Social Media is tracking everything we do.
2) Browsers are tracking everything we do.
3) ISPs may be about to acknowledge they are doing the tracking and already selling info.
4) The NSA is tracking everything that routes thru the WWW Routers and Servers.

Our info is being sold to others all the time. If you want to avoid it all, you likely cant. It is already happening now. I hope we can stop it from being far worse, but it is happening. At some point you have to ask yourself where on the slippery slope you want to plant the flag. I no longer cling to the idea that Big Brother isnt already here and into everything. Not conspiratorial, just admitting the obvious.

This happens all the time lately: I will be working on a quote for a project at work. Suddenly i will be getting ads for the things I am talking about in Jabber, Skype, Word Docs, Browsers, etc in my home email box and on my home pc. They will be showing me devices with technical specs and details etc they cannot be getting JUST from social media. I am not talking about C-TPAT systems on FB. When I was in class for IT the profs were excited about how many ways and levels you could data mine. Seems most of them have come true. The ISPs, like Charter, I bet they are quietly selling your email senders lists and phone call lugs already. Just because there is a law in the way, doesnt mean they arent actively circumventing it or flat out ignoring it.

 

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14 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

We are gnat straining here. There are three-four levels, or more, of tracking out there.

1) Social Media is tracking everything we do.

Not if you don't join them.

 

14 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

2) Browsers are tracking everything we do.

Chrome is.  Probably IE.  Firefox doesn't.  Neither does Safari.

 

14 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

3) ISPs may be about to acknowledge they are doing the tracking and already selling info.

If they were, they were doing so illegally.

 

14 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

4) The NSA is tracking everything that routes thru the WWW Routers and Servers.

Well, this I agree with. :)

 

14 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

Our info is being sold to others all the time. If you want to avoid it all, you likely cant. It is already happening now. I hope we can stop it from being far worse, but it is happening. At some point you have to ask yourself where on the slippery slope you want to plant the flag. I no longer cling to the idea that Big Brother isnt already here and into everything. NOt conspiratorial, just admitting the obvious.

I think any opportunity to thwart more of our info being given away should be taken.  I agree, people have allowed this for far too long already.  

I'm investigating good private, non-tracking VPNs myself.  Maybe the NSA will hack into it and watch me.  I don't know.  I'll bore them to death.  But I can't stop that.  I can do something about advertisers getting a dossier on my every viewing habit though.

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Oh we agree, Social Media is voluntary but for my family and church experience it is almost mandatory. I no longer think a large percentage of companies dont break laws at will. We should have a discussion about Wells Fargo sometime. I disagree, IE most certainly is tracking these days. I no longer trust that people that SAY they are defending my Right to Privacy are actually doing so. The lack of prosecution by the Obama Administration after the 2008 Financial Crisis has jaded me to the core. I openly think both parties are totally corrupted by $$$. If the govt wants meta data or just data they could quietly pass a regulation or law and get ISPs, SoftwareCompanies, OS Providers to include what ever they want or need in their tracking abilities. I think a good argument could be made that entities in the US Government, in an effort to track terrorists etc have developed very simple methods of collecting data etc.

Tax Filing over the Internet
VOIP Services could be really ingenius ways of tracking folks.
Free GPS Services
and on & on...

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2 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

We are gnat straining here. There are three-four levels, or more, of tracking out there.

1) Social Media is tracking everything we do.
2) Browsers are tracking everything we do.
3) ISPs may be about to acknowledge they are doing the tracking and already selling info.
4) The NSA is tracking everything that routes thru the WWW Routers and Servers.

Our info is being sold to others all the time. If you want to avoid it all, you likely cant. It is already happening now. I hope we can stop it from being far worse, but it is happening. At some point you have to ask yourself where on the slippery slope you want to plant the flag. I no longer cling to the idea that Big Brother isnt already here and into everything. Not conspiratorial, just admitting the obvious.

This happens all the time lately: I will be working on a quote for a project at work. Suddenly i will be getting ads for the things I am talking about in Jabber, Skype, Word Docs, Browsers, etc in my home email box and on my home pc. They will be showing me devices with technical specs and details etc they cannot be getting JUST from social media. I am not talking about C-TPAT systems on FB. When I was in class for IT the profs were excited about how many ways and levels you could data mine. Seems most of the have come true. The ISPs, like Charter, I bet they are quietly selling your email senders lists and phone call lugs already. Just because there is a law in the way, doesnt mean they arent actively circumventing it or flat out ignoring it.

 

No joke, it got scary last weekend for me and my brothers. We were drinking and someone quoted Charlton Heston about prying a gun from his cold dead hands, except we could not remember his name... only that he starred in planet of the apes.

 

After we talked about it (no electronics were used) I pulled out my phone and on google typed "P" that's all I put in and google auto fills with [Planet of the Apes star Charlton Heston gives "From my cold dead hands" speech at the NRA convention].

 

It's creepy, and it happens constantly nowadays.

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While this bothered me, it does not bother me as much as where I think a renewed assault will be aimed:  net neutrality.

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I also wrote to my Texas Senators to no avail. Our freedoms are slowly but surely being stripped from us so that companies can make money or so that the government can spy on us.  

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I was looking for a client's home to do some work on his wife's new PC.

I got the email at work with his address. I was in my truck and decided check google maps for the route. I opened google maps, typed in just the first 2 numbers of his address and his address suddenly popped to the top of the query. I had never looked up the address before. Google also knew which direction my truck was pointed even though i was turned about 45 degrees in the middle of a large cul de sac. I know i am not describing like the way it appeared to me, but google maps didnt ASSUME my truck direction, it knew it. I turned my phone 90 degrees, like the truck was moving, and it did not fall for it. As soon as the truck moved however, even a  few feet, it readjusted the graphic. And the fact that it pulled the address up to the top of the search without ever having searched for it before was just plain crazy. The intertwined algorithms at play there were bewildering. It had to not only find the nearest address starting with 18... it had to choose from a list of about 5 possibles separate 1800 blocks were available to choose from in that area. It picked his house number AND street from nothing more that two digits.

 

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18 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

I was looking for a client's home to do some work on his wife's new PC.

I got the email at work with his address. I was in my truck and decided check google maps for the route. I opened google maps, typed in just the first 2 numbers of his address and his address suddenly popped to the top of the query. I had never looked up the address before. Google also knew which direction my truck was pointed even though i was turned about 45 degrees in the middle of a large cul de sac. I know i am not describing like the way it appeared to me, but google maps didnt ASSUME my truck direction, it knew it. I turned my phone 90 degrees, like the truck was moving, and it did not fall for it. As soon as the truck moved however, even a  few feet, it readjusted the graphic. And the fact that it pulled the address up to the top of the search without ever having searched for it before was just plain crazy. The intertwined algorithms at play there were bewildering. It had to not only find the nearest address starting with 18... it had to choose from a list of about 5 possibles separate 1800 blocks were available to choose from in that area. It picked his house number AND street from nothing more that two digits.

 

But as I recall, at some point, you gave google permission to track your GPS location.

But I agree that the conflict between privacy and convienance is a dilemma.

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1 hour ago, homersapien said:

But as I recall, at some point, you gave google permission to track your GPS location.

But I agree that the conflict between privacy and convienance is a dilemma.

 

If Google were ever to be so inclined, they could unleash some devastating information warfare on the entire planet.

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On 4/7/2017 at 0:15 PM, Strychnine said:

 

If Google were ever to be so inclined, they could unleash some devastating information warfare on the entire planet.

I wonder just how capable our smart phones are?  How much information can they absorb about us, our habits?  How many ways could they be used to motivate/manipulate us?

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On 4/9/2017 at 10:20 PM, icanthearyou said:

I wonder just how capable our smart phones are?  How much information can they absorb about us, our habits?  How many ways could they be used to motivate/manipulate us?

 

Google's Android wants you to train it, so that it can then better cater to your habits.  Android (and Chrome) is also quite capable of learning your habits without you training it at all.  Thus far, Google's motive has been to provide you with information, services, and advertising that you might want.  Considering how enshrined smartphones have become in our society, the potential for manipulation or abuse is very great.  In fact, it is one of the reasons ISP's commitment to eliminating net neutrality concerns me greatly.

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On 4/16/2017 at 8:50 AM, icanthearyou said:

 

I have stated before that this issue does not concern nearly as much as net neutrality.  That said, this Representative has displayed such an ignorance of the issue, technology, and how essential the internet is to even modern business, that I feel he has no business even expressing an opinion (or vote) on the matter.  We are well beyond the point where the internet is a realistically optional thing.  It is deeply ingrained in commercial business, personal business, healthcare, and even government.  An argument that is effectively "if you do not like this policy, you do not have to use the internet" is idiotic, invalid, and out of touch with reality.

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