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posted by on Thursday February 02 2017, @04:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the another-special-relationship dept.

Full of confidence in Ajit Pai – the new boss at the FCC, America's communications watchdog – groups representing US telcos are seeking a repeal of the regulator's privacy rules.

Citing the appointment of Pai and the imminent decision to roll back the previous administration's net neutrality protections, industry groups now hope that the little requirement for an opt-in for the collection of user data will be frozen, if not done away with completely.

[...] "For over twenty years, ISPs have protected their consumers' data with the strongest pro-consumer policies in the internet ecosystem," the group writes.

"ISPs know the success of any digital business depends on earning their customers' trust on privacy."

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/31/net_neutrality_dead_privacy_next/


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  • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:03AM (#461936)

    Comcast has been selling consumers' information for years. This [xfinity.com] thread on the xfinity customer service page has plenty enough evidence, even if anecdotal, to indicate it's certainly been a policy for some time. Net neutrality did absolutely nothing to stop this. I suppose I could make that statement even more succinct: Net neutrality did absolutely nothing. People thinking they have privacy or security when they don't is far worse than people knowing they don't have security or privacy. I'd love for companies to start publicly and openly selling user information because it would cause people to actually start caring about it. So if canning this impotent set of unenforced rules we call 'net neutrality' is what it takes to get real change then bring it on.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @01:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @01:58PM (#461977)

    You are confused. Net neutrality and privacy are completely separate topics, which have nothing in common except for the fact that they both apply to the internet and are subject to FCC regulations.

    Yes, you are right: Net neutrality doesn't do anything for privacy. Guess what: It was never meant to. Expecting net neutrality to improve privacy is like expecting food safety regulations to improve the taste of your food.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @02:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @02:43PM (#461981)

      They are and they are not. Deep inspection of packets my friend. You need that for both: fast lane and privacy-raping policies.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday February 02 2017, @03:29PM

      by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Thursday February 02 2017, @03:29PM (#461993)

      Net neutrality and privacy are completely separate topics

      They most certainly aren't:

      If you don't have privacy but you have net neutrality, if you do want privacy anyway, you encrypt your traffic and it goes through at the same speed as Big Brother traffic.

      If you have neither and you try to encrypt your traffic, the internet becomes intolerably slow - thereby effectively killing your attempt to gain control over your privacy.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @04:17PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @04:17PM (#462002)

        Why would they slow it down, they'd just block the encrypted traffic outright like some ISP's used to do with legacy P2P traffic.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @04:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @04:44PM (#462009)

    If you think net neutrality is about security or privacy, I think you should double check the meaning. Net neutrality gives anyone serving up content a fair equal footing in bandwidth relative to everybody else rather than giving those with deep pockets a monopoly on the type of content or service provided. Privacy and security are separate matters entirely.

    On that note, I agree that ISPs should work to maintain the privacy and security of their customers, and further that that's no reason that there shouldn't be formal regulations to ensure that they're _required_ to do so. If requirements get repealed, what stops any provider from just saying "Great, we don't have spend any effort at all on privacy or security anymore"?

    Anyone that's ever held a job anywhere knows full well that a company won't dedicate any effort to something that they have no regulatory or financial motivation for. Even if it were in the best financial interests for a company to maintain privacy and security standards without regulatory requirement, that would only last until the second it became more profitable to sell information or access off.