SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the and-charge-for-bandwidth-consumed-by-ads dept.
Stuck with Comcast? You may get stuck some more!
Ars Technica , Gizmodo, ZDNet, and a host of others are reporting that Comcast claims that the FCC has no authority to limit or prohibit the internet provider from distributing web histories to advertisers.
From the Ars Technica article:
As the Federal Communications Commission debates new privacy rules for Internet service providers, Comcast has urged the commission to let ISPs offer different prices based on whether customers opt into systems that share their data and deliver personalized ads.
Comcast executives met with FCC officials last week, and "urged that the Commission allow business models offering discounts or other value to consumers in exchange for allowing ISPs to use their data," Comcast wrote in an ex parte filing that describes the meeting. (MediaPost covered the filing yesterday.)
AT&T is the biggest Internet provider offering such a plan. AT&T's "Internet Preferences" program reroutes customers' Web browsing to an in-house traffic scanning platform, analyzes the customers' search and browsing history, and then uses the results to deliver personalized ads to websites. With Internet Preferences enabled, AT&T customers can pay as little as $70 per month for 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home service, but those who don't opt into Internet Preferences must pay at least $29 a month extra.
[Continues...]
The Washington Post adds:
Consumer groups who oppose Comcast have said that Internet providers have a unique vantage point over everything an Internet user does online. For example, Netflix's intelligence about its users is largely limited to what customers do on its own platform, with little visibility into how those same people watch videos on Hulu or Amazon. (Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Internet providers, however, can detect when a subscriber visits all three sites.
Many analysts expect the FCC to finalize its privacy rules for Internet providers this year. But there are a lot of details to be hashed out, including whether Internet providers will be able to share subscriber data by default with marketers or whether they will be required to first obtain customers' explicit approval.
It's still unclear whether Comcast has actual, concrete plans to roll out a discount, data-driven Internet program. But what is clear is that the company has at least considered the possibility and wants looser rules for the industry that would permit such plans. A Comcast spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gizmodo puts it succinctly: "Comcast has logged yet another tally in the competition for Shittiest Company In Existence."
(Score: 2) by gidds on Friday August 05 2016, @03:39PM
This is probably an ignorant question, but isn't that just shifting the problem?
If ISPs aren't trustworthy (and they clearly aren't), despite being paid, then why should VPN providers be? They have exactly the same opportunities.
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday August 05 2016, @07:07PM
Some people use VPNs to avoid geoblocking but others use them specifically to increase their privacy. If a VPN provider gets a repuatation for poor privacy practices, its customers can readily change to another provider.
I suspect that a greater proportion of an ISP's customers (as compared to those of a VPN) won't care about their own privacy. Those who do care have few other ISPs to choose from.
(Score: 2) by gidds on Saturday August 06 2016, @08:23AM
Isn't that the problem, then, rather than any inherent security/privacy advantage of VPNs?
(Here in the UK, that's not really an issue, as we can generally choose from a wide range of ADSL, cable, and wireless broadband providers.)
After all, your traffic must hit the general Internet at some point, whether it's your ISP's connection, your VPN provider's connection, a Tor exit node*, or whatever, so you have to trust someone.
(* The advantage of Tor being, AIUI, that that node can't tell who you are.)
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday August 06 2016, @10:11PM
With a VPN, one's ISP can't log the sites one connects to, nor can those sites log one's "real" IP address, which could be a clue to one's location. You're quite right to point out that the VPN provider does have that information. I suppose people chain VPNs to avoid that.