【[Ep4] Secret Campus】

As President Donald J. Trump’s systematic dismantling of 21st century public policy continues,[Ep4] Secret Campus we pause a moment to mourn the death of a set of broadband interent privacy principals that will never see the light of day.

On this day in 2017, President Donald J. Trump is scheduled to sign a bill that stamps out the small embers of the Federal Communication Commission’s rules for “Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services.”

Enacted in the waning days of the Barack Obama presidency, the rules were set to take effect in early 2017.

SEE ALSO: U.S. Senate to America: Yeah, we’ll let internet providers pimp out your personal data

But shortly after birth, what came to be known colloquially as “Broadband Privacy Rules” were targeted by the incoming Trump administration as an unnecessary overreach. Republicans declared these regulations as more rules that would hinder business and competition (even though the rules made explicit exemptions for broadband enterprise customers). Rule supporters, like Fight for the Future, took note of how those companies that would have to follow the rules, internet service providers, have been pouring money into congressional coffers in an attempt to sway the vote to kill the rule in their direction.

They succeeded. First the Senate and then the House passed a bill to kill the rule that ultimately was never implemented.

When Trump signs the bill into law either today or tomorrow it will mark the end of:

Transparency

When you surf the web through your broadband service provider, you leave more breadcrumbs than Hansel and Gretel in a forest. Instead of one wolf waiting for you in grandma’s house, there’s an entire pack waiting to descend, not on you, but the bread crumbs, the bits of personal data (habits, name, address, social security number) you leave on countless web sites.

The wolf den is really every ISP that manages your Internet connection. Whether these scavengers have access your data is up to them. The Broadband Privacy Rule would’ve required ISPs to state their intentions directly to you: what they want to collect, how they might share it and sell it and to whom.

Now, your data can be sold to each and every wolf willing to pay.

That level of transparency might have kept the wolves at bay. Now, your data can be sold to each and every wolf willing to pay.

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Now ISPs don’t have to tell you a thing. The data that you didn’t manage to protect on your own (by not sharing, using disposable email addresses, in private browsing and even virtual private networks) is open to the pack and you may never know.

Choice

When you visit a Web site or sign up for a new service, there are often those little check boxes that ask if you want to receive email newsletters about the company’s latest plans, products and offers. If the message says, “Click here to receive,” that’s called “Opt-in.” If it says, “Click here if you don’t want to receive our newsletter,” that’s called opt-out.

Congratulations, you’re all getting the stupid newsletter.

Opt-out basically means you need to take action to not receive the newsletter. Opt-in is like raising your hand, saying yes, to the newsletter.

That distinction no longer matters because ISPs don’t have to ask you whether you want to opt-in-or out to its data mining, sharing and selling practices. Ask behavioral economists about the power of opt in versus opt out.

Trump signing this bill is like a giant opt-in for the broadband nation. Congratulations, you’re all getting the stupid newsletter.

Data security and breach Notification

Anyone who has customer data, especially data that relates to personal and financial information, is under almost constant attack from would-be hackers. They always hope to find a treasure trove of customer data stored on an unsecured server. If they’re really lucky, the data isn’t even encrypted.

The ISPs are no longer under any special pressure to protect your data. Worse yet, they don’t even have to tell you when someone broke into the hen house and made off with your breadcrumbs (sorry, I’m so wound up that I’m mixing metaphors).

Dissolution of the rules makes ISPs lip-smacking hacker bait.

The point is, knowing that a hacker gained access to ISP data is critical for consumers. The sooner customers know, the sooner they can protect other connected data and, most likely, change a bunch of passwords.

And if ISPs weren’t targets before, the dissolution of the Broadband Privacy Rules guarantees that these providers will be collecting and selling more data than ever, making them lip-smacking hacker bait.

Privacy first

ISPs can, it seems, do whatever they want now, regardless of whether or not it’s in the best interest of customers, their privacy and security. Where we’re going, there really are no rules for the Broadband Service Providers.

So let us have a moment of silence for the still-born Broadband Privacy Rule and take a deep breath as we prepare for the new wild-west of American Data Privacy.

Score one for the big guys.

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Topics Cybersecurity Privacy Donald Trump