Can someone explain what "selling web browsing and app usage data" really means?
I don't imagine they literally package sensitive information and distribute it to anyone who pays. In which case, "they sell your data" is completely misleading.
> * I don't imagine they literally package sensitive information and distribute it to anyone who pays.*
Why on earth don't you imagine that? On this website alone, there are quite literally stories every week about various companies doing that exact thing.
It means exactly what it say on the tin. This isn't a hypothetical, either, but a class of behaviour which has happened repeatedly in the past. Here are a few examples of things which the FCC & FTC eventually stopped; there's zero reason to believe that this behaviour won't resume as soon as it's safe to accept that money.
Large ISPs like Verizon altered HTTP traffic to inject a unique identifier which linked all of your traffic across devices and sites and sold a service linking those identifiers to demographic information. Even without paying, you could use that to reliably link user activity across every plain-text HTTP service:
Another interesting allegation came from Andreas Gal after he left Mozilla, claiming that Google's competitors were paying ISPs for copies of user's search activity so they could improve their search engine by using ranking closer to Google's. Given how many people search for sensitive or identifying terms, that's already a concern and, again, there's no reason to think companies with very limited competition won't expand their profits if it's safe:
A lot of tracking happens through other means so that Internet advertising agencies (Google/Facebook/etc) can show targeted ads to you across networks of sites. Having the data from the ISP allows them and others who need the data to better fingerprint you and show more targeted ads. But apart from advertising, isn't it conceivable that if the law doesn't forbid it and there is a buyer for your data, that ISP's would sell it to make easy money? There was that recent news of how Uber was buying Lyft email receipt data from a company whose product helped it's customer's manage their email.
At my core, I believe everyone, regardless of affiliation or beliefs has a right to online privacy.
On the other, man do I freaking wish that one of the big porn sites would put up a billboard with the (private) sexual fetishes of these specific elected officials.
Edit: I would wish more for the latter if I thought it would change anything.
This point gets made a lot. "Person/Group X doesn't believe in the right to privacy/free expression/due process/whatever so we shouldn't extend rights to those people."
If it's a right, you have it just by being human; it's not given to you as a reward in exchange for good behavior. And there's a good reason for that, because such loopholes are ripe for abuse.
Remarkably, people can label and truly believe ANYONE is a facist. When Bush was president, people compared him to Hitler. When Obama was president, people compared him to Hitler. Now Trump is Hitler. I've heard people non-ironically compare Steve Jobs to Hitler. Comparing an Apple CEO to history's most notorious genocidal dictator, in complete earnestness.
Do we want us, a crazy bunch of humans that for the most part seem to be unable to differentiate between an idea we don't like and genocide, deciding who is deserving enough to have rights? Privacy is a complicated issue, and I don't think it would be hard to paint all but the most zealous of advocates as being soft of privacy and therefore undeserving. Not a path I hope we go down.
Everyone has the right to go where they please but occasionally we put people behind bars as a punishment. That's not as contradictory as you make it seem.
I'm the only person allowed (by me) to be a hypocrite.
The legal doctrines collectively called estoppel ensure this in courts of equity. You cannot first argue one thing and then later argue a contradictory position. And in the court of public opinion, you cannot argue that no one has the right to data privacy and then later try to invoke some form of right to data privacy for yourself.
Most of the time, that doesn't matter. But when a member of a legislature codifies into law that I don't have privacy, I for danged sure am not going to even grant that guy a sliver of a courtesy of a fig leaf of privacy. I would air his dirty laundry immediately and without hesitation the instant any shred of it landed in my lap.
Because rights are a cooperative compact between equals. They are given as a reward for good behavior, but it is the summation of good behavior across hundreds of millions of individuals. It doesn't matter so much what I believe in relation to a right, but what I do. If I, for instance, did not believe that owning and carrying sidearms was a right, I probably would just not own or carry one, and the right would not be affected. If I instead launched a crusade to destroy all pistols, my neighbors would likely be even more unhappy if I did it while carrying for my own protection.
You only have those rights you are willing to extend to others. That is tit-for-tat social strategy writ large.
I think it's fair to say that a politician who votes away online privacy for everyone has explicitly waived his or her own personal right to that online privacy.
Everyone else may have personal views that are not reflected by the law. That's a good reason to not make them suffer for the sake of it just because of what the law says.
Politicians have the power to directly vote for or against laws. They are the only people to whom this caveat does not apply.
An electronic billboard, where the private sexual fetishes of 1 random constituent are publicly displayed, next to their name. A new unlucky constituent is randomly chosen and displayed every day. At the bottom, a bold red banner reads, "[REPRESENTATIVE NAME] TOOK $XX,XXX FROM THE CABLE INDUSTRY, THEN VOTED TO LET THIS HAPPEN."
I'm not sure people would connect with that. Like if Adam and Eve published that some random person ordered a dildo, the public reaction is likely "meh" for everybody who doesn't know said person.
Publishing that a congressperson ordered a dildo or butt-plug would get peoples' attention pretty fast- and might accelerate change.
I'm starting to warn people not to go to WebMD and similar sites because of recent events.
Perhaps- but the reaction every common person has to the possibility that the next name will be theirs would incite involvement. Switch to the congressman every Friday or something, and randoms in between.
With all the data mishaps these days, I never heard about WebMD. Care to elaborate? A search for WebMD+Leak does not give me results I would choose to click if I didn't have to.
Coincidentally enough, most people(even in tech) didn't hear about the Experian leak, perhaps that was because
That's very sex-negative of you to think of sexual fetishes as something you should be ashamed of and keep hidden from others. Also, the kind of porn you watch doesn't imply what you are attracted to.
Both points are valid. Human sexuality is broad and deep. Using it as a weapon against people is wrong and leads to terrible things. Still, the proposed strategy would definitely have a sock factor, even for the most sexually liberated of individuals. I think it would be a shitty thing to do, but it would get attention.
I read a lot of grotesque guro manga. I'm talking decapitations, body mutilation, etc. However I can't stand the sight of real blood and the idea of even "light" guro IRL is a huge turn off. So I'm not really sure I'd say I'm attracted to the idea so much as I get off to the art style? I'm sure there's other examples (eg: women w/ regards to simulated rape videos) where people can get off to porn of it but aren't necessarily attracted to that thing/idea.
Throwaway for obvious reasons but I figured you deserved an attempt at an answer.
Thanks for the reply, the examples (I was only considering more general/mainstream porn) and the apt use of a throwaway for a post like that in a thread on online privacy. :)
There are two sides to the 'value' equation here. The telecoms can now sell your data, but that also means that somebody needs to be buying it on the other end.
This campaign does a great job of calling out Senators who sold out their voters.
I'd like to see us also call out the companies that buy the data from the telecoms. Just because it is legal, doesn't mean it is right. I'm not sure how one would track down who purchased the data, but if a billboard said "X bought your data without your consent", would shaming the purchaser also be a possibility?
No they can't. It Has been illegal for nearly a century and it id still is illegal to sell telecommunication customers' data. Congress just reversed the FCC rules from October. It has to do with an government agency overstepping their authority and nothing to do with privacy.
Anybody who says otherwise is lying or ignorant of the law regarding CPNI.
How many bold faced lies can you fit into 3 sentences?
> It has to do with an government agency overstepping their authority
I've seen this horseshit repeated ad naseum.The U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 granted the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authority to regulate how customer proprietary network information (CPNI) can be used and to enforce related consumer information privacy provisions. In 2015, Broadband Internet Service Providers were reclassified as telecommunications companies, meaning that these rules will apply to them. They are not an information service. Google is an information service. They provide me with an internet connection, they do not provide me with any content at all and no consumer expects that from them.
Do you understand that an Act has to be passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the president? I don't know how much more legitimate authority can get when you are granted authority by our elected representatives.
> and nothing to do with privacy.
From the very first sentence of the FCC's 2007 REPORT AND ORDER AND FURTHER NOTICE OF PROPOSED RULEMAKING [0]
"In this Order, the Commission responds to the practice of “pretexting” by strengthening our rules to protect the privacy of customer proprietary network information (CPNI)"
>It Has been illegal for nearly a century and it id still is illegal to sell telecommunication customers' data.
FALSE
AGAIN, from the FCC's 2007 REPORT AND ORDER AND
FURTHER NOTICE OF PROPOSED RULEMAKING [0]
"We modify our rules to require telecommunications carriers to obtain opt-in consent from a
customer before disclosing that customer’s CPNI to a carrier’s joint venture partner or independent
contractor for the purpose of marketing communications-related services to that customer.117 While we
realize that this is a change in Commission policy, we find that new circumstances force us to reassess our
existing regulations. As we have found previously, the Commission has a substantial interest in
protecting customer privacy."
"Based on this and in light of new privacy concerns, we now find that an
opt-in framework for the sharing of CPNI with joint venture partners and independent contractors for the
purposes of marketing communications-related services to a customer both directly advances our interest
in protecting customer privacy and is narrowly tailored to achieve our goal of privacy protection"
"Joint Venture and Independent Contractor Use of CPNI. We modify our rules to require
carriers to obtain opt-in consent from a customer before disclosing a customer’s CPNI to a carrier’s
joint venture partners or independent contractors for the purposes of marketing communicationsrelated
services to that customer."
So do you think you can link to an obtuse document written in legalese, hoping that no one will read it? These are the rules from 2015...8 years after the FCC changed how telcos may use your CPNI
Just reading the rest of your comment history, do you do this for profit or for pleasure?
> Also possible that we will see the rise of a data broker, w
That people aren't aware that the digitization this is and has been a very lucrative profession for at least 20 years is testament to how, shalll we say, shadowy they are :)
Besides the moral implications, being a data broker sounds like a cool, cyberpunk-esque gig.
I'm British and I think that swearing enriches language when used judiciously.
Also - expressing emotion and anger is valuable when the situation calls for it. Personally I would have considered something stronger than 'turd' in this case.
Hitchens was inexhaustibly eloquent and grandiloquent; his skill at using expletives for emphasis in service to his message reflected his mastery of the language.
Gawker (and all of its puerile clickbait spawn) is no Chris Hitchens.
"I'm British and I think that swearing enriches language when used judiciously."
It does. But "My political opponents are [swear word]" is not judicious. (Or profanity if you prefer; most Americans would not call "turd" a swear word but it is obviously merely a more genteel way of calling someone a shit, it is a low-grade profanity.)
It's very common and hardly new. It may even be tactically or strategically sound for some desired goals. But it's not judicious, having the same root as judge, being similar to magisterial. Dignified, mature magistrates do not say "People who disagree with me are poo poo heads." If they are inclined to fling insults, they usually use a much higher grade. See, for instance: http://allowe.com/laughs/book/When%20Insults%20Had%20Class.h...
And here i thought that being "mature" is about taking responsibility for your actions, thinking about others instead of only yourself, looking at the bigger picture and maybe even making sacrifices for it, even being the "bigger man" when the situation calls for it. But no, being "mature" is about being politically correct. Fuck that, i'l stay a child kthnxbye.
The contempt these politicians have for you and their willingness to trample all over you in the service of the uber-wealthy and powerful is unlimited. Why should they be afforded any respect at all?
They were unrecognizable nobodies before, and now they are unrecognizable nobodies with more money. They will become unrecognizable nobodies again, next week, or next month, or next year, and move right along with the rest of their lives.
Conceptually, this is how legislation works. You start with politicians no one cares about, and you end with politicians no one cares about selling you out, because most of what they do is boring.
If you see your Congress people on the list you should help replace them with moderates in their primaries and call them more during the year.
Everyone needs to get to know their Congress. Even if they aren't on the list, find out who they are and how to contact them. You only have 3 of them! 2 statewide senators and your house rep. Just 3!
My state does not have open primaries, and my rep tore his fax machine out of the wall to keep ResistBot from using it. Some of these people are like cockroaches. They scuttle into the closest hiding spot whenever the lights come on. Then they're back to crawling all over your food the instant the public gets distracted again.
And they can get away with it, thanks to safe districts.
What we need to focus on is purely algorithmic redistricting for 2020, and approval voting for all ballots. Gerrymandering and FPTP voting are deliberate impediments to political competition that must be removed if meaningful change is to occur.
Your voice will not be heard on net neutrality if your rep doesn't have to listen to you. Your voice will not be heard on data privacy if your rep does not have to listen to you. Your voice will not be heard on allowing local municipal broadband systems if your rep does not have to listen to you. Your voice will not be heard on anything so long as your rep can safely ignore you term after term after term.
So you really need to worry about your state legislature now, so you can abolish gerrymandering before 2020, and possibly also get rid of first-past-the-post voting.
There is exactly one person in the house you vote for. So, rather than 535 nobodies, it's 3 people (1 house, 2 senate) you should pay attention to. At a minimum you should be able to name your congressional representatives and something about them. But, realizing people in the house have very small margins in absolute terms should embolden you as shifting 1,000 voters can swap many elections and most even vaguely competitive races are less than 10,000.
PS: Sure, if someone really annoys you then make a note to donate 20$ and to their competitor in either primary or general election depending on your party of choice.
And more to the point -- the time to trash pols is before elections, not after. By the time November 2018 rolls around, no one will remember or care about the Net Neutrality Sellout of 2017. Which is a bummer.
The title from the people who actually did the campaign is a little more morning coffee friendly[1]. If you get as upset as I do every time you see a story like this why not head over and donate today?
65 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 36.2 ms ] threadI don't imagine they literally package sensitive information and distribute it to anyone who pays. In which case, "they sell your data" is completely misleading.
Why on earth don't you imagine that? On this website alone, there are quite literally stories every week about various companies doing that exact thing.
E.g.: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/04/23/heartbreaking
Large ISPs like Verizon altered HTTP traffic to inject a unique identifier which linked all of your traffic across devices and sites and sold a service linking those identifiers to demographic information. Even without paying, you could use that to reliably link user activity across every plain-text HTTP service:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh https://arstechnica.com/security/2014/10/verizon-wireless-in...
Going further back, a number of ISPs got heat for reselling access to customer activity to various tracking services:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04...
Another interesting allegation came from Andreas Gal after he left Mozilla, claiming that Google's competitors were paying ISPs for copies of user's search activity so they could improve their search engine by using ranking closer to Google's. Given how many people search for sensitive or identifying terms, that's already a concern and, again, there's no reason to think companies with very limited competition won't expand their profits if it's safe:
https://andreasgal.com/2015/03/30/data-is-at-the-heart-of-se...
At my core, I believe everyone, regardless of affiliation or beliefs has a right to online privacy.
On the other, man do I freaking wish that one of the big porn sites would put up a billboard with the (private) sexual fetishes of these specific elected officials.
Edit: I would wish more for the latter if I thought it would change anything.
If it's a right, you have it just by being human; it's not given to you as a reward in exchange for good behavior. And there's a good reason for that, because such loopholes are ripe for abuse.
Remarkably, people can label and truly believe ANYONE is a facist. When Bush was president, people compared him to Hitler. When Obama was president, people compared him to Hitler. Now Trump is Hitler. I've heard people non-ironically compare Steve Jobs to Hitler. Comparing an Apple CEO to history's most notorious genocidal dictator, in complete earnestness.
Do we want us, a crazy bunch of humans that for the most part seem to be unable to differentiate between an idea we don't like and genocide, deciding who is deserving enough to have rights? Privacy is a complicated issue, and I don't think it would be hard to paint all but the most zealous of advocates as being soft of privacy and therefore undeserving. Not a path I hope we go down.
The legal doctrines collectively called estoppel ensure this in courts of equity. You cannot first argue one thing and then later argue a contradictory position. And in the court of public opinion, you cannot argue that no one has the right to data privacy and then later try to invoke some form of right to data privacy for yourself.
Most of the time, that doesn't matter. But when a member of a legislature codifies into law that I don't have privacy, I for danged sure am not going to even grant that guy a sliver of a courtesy of a fig leaf of privacy. I would air his dirty laundry immediately and without hesitation the instant any shred of it landed in my lap.
Because rights are a cooperative compact between equals. They are given as a reward for good behavior, but it is the summation of good behavior across hundreds of millions of individuals. It doesn't matter so much what I believe in relation to a right, but what I do. If I, for instance, did not believe that owning and carrying sidearms was a right, I probably would just not own or carry one, and the right would not be affected. If I instead launched a crusade to destroy all pistols, my neighbors would likely be even more unhappy if I did it while carrying for my own protection.
You only have those rights you are willing to extend to others. That is tit-for-tat social strategy writ large.
Everyone else may have personal views that are not reflected by the law. That's a good reason to not make them suffer for the sake of it just because of what the law says.
Politicians have the power to directly vote for or against laws. They are the only people to whom this caveat does not apply.
An electronic billboard, where the private sexual fetishes of 1 random constituent are publicly displayed, next to their name. A new unlucky constituent is randomly chosen and displayed every day. At the bottom, a bold red banner reads, "[REPRESENTATIVE NAME] TOOK $XX,XXX FROM THE CABLE INDUSTRY, THEN VOTED TO LET THIS HAPPEN."
Publishing that a congressperson ordered a dildo or butt-plug would get peoples' attention pretty fast- and might accelerate change.
I'm starting to warn people not to go to WebMD and similar sites because of recent events.
Coincidentally enough, most people(even in tech) didn't hear about the Experian leak, perhaps that was because
1)The data was sold "legally" to the actor
2-∞)...[reasons].
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/03/experian-lapse-allowed-id...
Yours is a barely-disguised version of the usual "I don't care about privacy because have nothing to hide" argument.
How does it not imply what you're attracted to?
Throwaway for obvious reasons but I figured you deserved an attempt at an answer.
This campaign does a great job of calling out Senators who sold out their voters.
I'd like to see us also call out the companies that buy the data from the telecoms. Just because it is legal, doesn't mean it is right. I'm not sure how one would track down who purchased the data, but if a billboard said "X bought your data without your consent", would shaming the purchaser also be a possibility?
Anybody who says otherwise is lying or ignorant of the law regarding CPNI.
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2015-title47-vol3/pdf/CFR-...
ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-comment-congressional-move-al...
EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/five-creepy-things-you...
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/28/internet-...
> It has to do with an government agency overstepping their authority
I've seen this horseshit repeated ad naseum.The U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 granted the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authority to regulate how customer proprietary network information (CPNI) can be used and to enforce related consumer information privacy provisions. In 2015, Broadband Internet Service Providers were reclassified as telecommunications companies, meaning that these rules will apply to them. They are not an information service. Google is an information service. They provide me with an internet connection, they do not provide me with any content at all and no consumer expects that from them.
Do you understand that an Act has to be passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the president? I don't know how much more legitimate authority can get when you are granted authority by our elected representatives.
> and nothing to do with privacy.
From the very first sentence of the FCC's 2007 REPORT AND ORDER AND FURTHER NOTICE OF PROPOSED RULEMAKING [0]
"In this Order, the Commission responds to the practice of “pretexting” by strengthening our rules to protect the privacy of customer proprietary network information (CPNI)"
>It Has been illegal for nearly a century and it id still is illegal to sell telecommunication customers' data.
FALSE
AGAIN, from the FCC's 2007 REPORT AND ORDER AND FURTHER NOTICE OF PROPOSED RULEMAKING [0]
"We modify our rules to require telecommunications carriers to obtain opt-in consent from a customer before disclosing that customer’s CPNI to a carrier’s joint venture partner or independent contractor for the purpose of marketing communications-related services to that customer.117 While we realize that this is a change in Commission policy, we find that new circumstances force us to reassess our existing regulations. As we have found previously, the Commission has a substantial interest in protecting customer privacy."
"Based on this and in light of new privacy concerns, we now find that an opt-in framework for the sharing of CPNI with joint venture partners and independent contractors for the purposes of marketing communications-related services to a customer both directly advances our interest in protecting customer privacy and is narrowly tailored to achieve our goal of privacy protection"
"Joint Venture and Independent Contractor Use of CPNI. We modify our rules to require carriers to obtain opt-in consent from a customer before disclosing a customer’s CPNI to a carrier’s joint venture partners or independent contractors for the purposes of marketing communicationsrelated services to that customer."
> https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2015-title47-vol3/pdf/CFR-...
So do you think you can link to an obtuse document written in legalese, hoping that no one will read it? These are the rules from 2015...8 years after the FCC changed how telcos may use your CPNI
Just reading the rest of your comment history, do you do this for profit or for pleasure?
[0]: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-07-22A1.pd...
The most obvious methods that comes to mind:
Isolate the purchase to some kind of shell company or chain of shell companies. The sale can go through them and end up in my hands.
Also possible that we will see the rise of a data broker, who buys the data and sells it to clients but keeps them anonymous.
That people aren't aware that the digitization this is and has been a very lucrative profession for at least 20 years is testament to how, shalll we say, shadowy they are :)
Besides the moral implications, being a data broker sounds like a cool, cyberpunk-esque gig.
Is this really the new normal for websites ?
Also - expressing emotion and anger is valuable when the situation calls for it. Personally I would have considered something stronger than 'turd' in this case.
Oh. Here's Hitchens saying "Fuck" a lot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO129-RfhVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1fmWVECUI4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB_dgqy6l4k
Gawker (and all of its puerile clickbait spawn) is no Chris Hitchens.
Think of some great comedians, especially Scots, like Billy Connolly and Frankie Boyle - who use a good swear word very well.
I agree with your point, and still also with OP.
It does. But "My political opponents are [swear word]" is not judicious. (Or profanity if you prefer; most Americans would not call "turd" a swear word but it is obviously merely a more genteel way of calling someone a shit, it is a low-grade profanity.)
It's very common and hardly new. It may even be tactically or strategically sound for some desired goals. But it's not judicious, having the same root as judge, being similar to magisterial. Dignified, mature magistrates do not say "People who disagree with me are poo poo heads." If they are inclined to fling insults, they usually use a much higher grade. See, for instance: http://allowe.com/laughs/book/When%20Insults%20Had%20Class.h...
Furthermore, the way these lawmakers treat us is the only crass thing occuring.
Maybe it's an American thing, but I honestly didn't notice anything odd about the headline until you complained.
A goal of Hacker News is to avoid this though.
They were unrecognizable nobodies before, and now they are unrecognizable nobodies with more money. They will become unrecognizable nobodies again, next week, or next month, or next year, and move right along with the rest of their lives.
Conceptually, this is how legislation works. You start with politicians no one cares about, and you end with politicians no one cares about selling you out, because most of what they do is boring.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15100620/congress-fcc-isp...
If you see your Congress people on the list you should help replace them with moderates in their primaries and call them more during the year.
Everyone needs to get to know their Congress. Even if they aren't on the list, find out who they are and how to contact them. You only have 3 of them! 2 statewide senators and your house rep. Just 3!
And the Republican party have become the moderate party, there is no truly conservative party anymore.
And they can get away with it, thanks to safe districts.
What we need to focus on is purely algorithmic redistricting for 2020, and approval voting for all ballots. Gerrymandering and FPTP voting are deliberate impediments to political competition that must be removed if meaningful change is to occur.
Your voice will not be heard on net neutrality if your rep doesn't have to listen to you. Your voice will not be heard on data privacy if your rep does not have to listen to you. Your voice will not be heard on allowing local municipal broadband systems if your rep does not have to listen to you. Your voice will not be heard on anything so long as your rep can safely ignore you term after term after term.
So you really need to worry about your state legislature now, so you can abolish gerrymandering before 2020, and possibly also get rid of first-past-the-post voting.
PS: Sure, if someone really annoys you then make a note to donate 20$ and to their competitor in either primary or general election depending on your party of choice.
[1]https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2017-05-03-crowdfunde...