First, the article says that ISP's will sell user data to the "highest bidder." This is precisely the opposite of the proper characterization. Rather, they'll sell to anyone and everyone who gives them money for it.
Second, although the bill -- very surprisingly -- seems to have NOT exempted members of Congress from the law, I'm really doubting that Comcast, et. al., will include such data in their sales. The article says that ISP's will anonymize the data, and I certainly expect them to try, but it's been well proven that given just a piece or two of personally-identifying information can unravel this sort of thing, so I expect them to scrub particular subscribers from their data entirely, specifically so that mega-stars can't sue them, or members of Congress aren't embarrassed to the point of actually writing real privacy laws. That would make the situation objectively worse for them.
So, no, no one is going to be able to buy congressional browsing histories. I would imagine that Comcast is explaining all of this to the fence-sitting Senators right now.
There were no "fence-sitting" Senators for this vote - all voting Republicans wanted to remove privacy protections. All Democratic and Independent Senators voted to keep privacy protections in place.
The Senate is 52R, 46D, 2I, there were 2 abstentions during the Vote so there was some fence sitting at least on the R side, and they've decided to chick out completely.
The two non-voting senators were Republicans. One was Rand Paul who co-sponsored the bill, apparently there's some tradition of not voting for your own bill (when there are votes to spare). The other one, Isakson, is recovering from surgery and not in D.C. to vote.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 39.8 ms ] threadSecond, although the bill -- very surprisingly -- seems to have NOT exempted members of Congress from the law, I'm really doubting that Comcast, et. al., will include such data in their sales. The article says that ISP's will anonymize the data, and I certainly expect them to try, but it's been well proven that given just a piece or two of personally-identifying information can unravel this sort of thing, so I expect them to scrub particular subscribers from their data entirely, specifically so that mega-stars can't sue them, or members of Congress aren't embarrassed to the point of actually writing real privacy laws. That would make the situation objectively worse for them.
So, no, no one is going to be able to buy congressional browsing histories. I would imagine that Comcast is explaining all of this to the fence-sitting Senators right now.