It’s official: Trump has just signed a law allowing Internet service providers (ISPs) to sell your personal information -- letting them make a nice profit while undermining your privacy.
Under the new law, ISPs now have the right to collect your browsing history, including domains, time spent on sites, and in some cases even what pages you viewed. Information about you and your family will be treated like a commodity; fodder for corporate America to profit from.
Let’s be perfectly clear: this bill is toxic to everyone except for Verizon, AT&T and Comcast and their CEOs. To stop it we need to go to the source -- let’s put the CEOs of these internet giants in the spotlight and ask why they think it’s ok to sell your private information for profit.
Verizon, AT&T and Comcast -- we demand you publicly commit to never selling away our privacy to the highest bidder!
Last year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released new rules designed to protect internet users from their service providers.
This new law strips away those protections, allowing ISPs the right to sell your information and privacy to the highest bidder.
So much for draining the swamp -- this law benefits nobody except for lobbyists and their big business paymasters.
As Senator Ed Markey wrote: “Consumers will have no ability to stop Internet service providers from invading their privacy and selling sensitive information about their health, finances, and children to advertisers, insurers, data brokers, without… consent.”
In an age of mass surveillance, it’s more important than ever that we protect what little privacy we have. Congress has sold us out -- we need to demand these companies never sell out our privacy.
125,000 SumOfUs members spoke out when these same ISPs tried to tamper with net neutrality. Now, with our privacy at stake, we need to speak up again, and let these companies know that this fight isn’t over yet.
These ISPs want to sell our information for profit. Let’s demand they publicly commit to never doing that!
More information
New York Times. 29 March 2017.
The Intercept. 30 March 2017.