[RD] American lawmakers/senators voting to take internet privacy away.

The government isn't preventing you from a) negotiating for a contractual term protecting your information, or b) refusing to enter into a contract which doesn't contain such a term.

Are there still people who actually believe that's how consumers contracts work?

You have to completely ignore the relative power of the involved parties to say that with a straight face. It's simply not a real option for the overwhelming majority of people.
 
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I, for one, welcome our new Cyberpunk Overlords.
 
Perhaps the US is different, but I assume like the rest of the common law world, information is generally not considered to be property, unless it falls into specific IP categories (and even in relation to those IP categories, it's not so much the information that is the property, as the chose in action existing within the rights pertaining to that information).

In relation to whether it's a ban, my understanding of the change is that you're still entirely free to control the information in question, as Zelig points out. The government isn't preventing you from a) negotiating for a contractual term protecting your information, or b) refusing to enter into a contract which doesn't contain such a term.

This is not, of course, to say that this legislation is perfectly fine and presents no privacy issues; I'm just challenging what appears to be an utterly ridiculous statement, when there are perfectly valid arguments to be made instead. It's really not an artful strategy, and leads to complaints being easily dismissed rather than taken seriously.


The word you're looking for, and failing to find, is "extortion".

"HI, we've taken your life. If you want it back, you have to pay us. How much? How much you got?"

Apparently you've never been exposed to Coase.
 
The EFF has put up a list of things that ISP's have done in the past that are now easier / legal after this ruling:
  • Selling your location and personal information to marketers: this is something that some ISPs do now but are loathe to admit because they fear a consumer backlash. With this vote, companies no longer have to fear that. Everyone will do it.
  • Hijacking searches: You may find that a search for a particular object sees you automatically redirected to a company offering that product – a company that paid your ISP for that traffic and which is most likely not offering the best deal.
  • Inserting ads: we've all experienced the creepy situation where ads for something you were looking at a few days ago keep popping up on other websites like Facebook. Well, that may become the norm as ISPs sell your information to eager businesses looking for customers.
  • Installing apps on your phone that track you: when researchers discovered an app called Carrier IQ on phones, which sent data on what apps you use and what websites you visit, people were justifiably upset. It was put there by many people's mobile phone provider. And it won't be the last of it.
  • Undetectable tracking code: wherever you go, whatever you do, your ISP will be watching you. And you can't turn it off – even if you go to the trouble of using some browsers' "incognito" mode, your ISPs will still know where you are going online and when. And will then sell that data to anyone willing to pay what they charge.
 
You don't need to trust your VPN provider not to sell your data in the future, you just need to trust them not to store user data now, so there's nothing to sell in the future.

In theory, I agree. But in practice, the VPN provide has to store at least some of your data just to prevent abuse. So you would have to trust them to properly delete your data. And I am not not sure I would trust any organization with that.
 
Of course not, but it's the correct answer when speaking in terms of property rights.

It's the correct answer when speaking in terms of property law. In this case the law strips people of the natural right to the proceeds from their own browsing data.
 
Just so everyone knows, the vote passed. Now the law is changed. Kiss your private confidential property goodbye.
 
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Bye bye fourth amendment.
 
So no privacity for anybody anymore. Is this communism or fascism?
 
Just so everyone knows, the vote passed. Now the law is changed. Kiss your private confidential property goodbye.

Net neutrality is next I suppose. Funny thing is the populace is barely going to hear a whisper about these topics because the big media companies also own ISPs.
 
The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to private entities.

Well well.

It seem that there are things about the US constitution law that I will never understand.

My first thought is that it seems a fairly useless amendment then if the government
can just pay an ISP to burgle US peoples' data, or if already burgled; buy it second hand..
 
I think the intent of the fourth is just to protect people from corrupt policing more than anything.

It does make me wonder, can an investigator now go and buy a suspect's internet usage data without a warrant?
 
Could you explain this a little more?

If you have enough customers, some of them will start doing something illegal. Sooner or later this will lead to the local authorities coming to your place and demand the logs in order to identify the criminal. If you tell them that you do not have any logs, they will come up with some means to force you to have logs (and in countries with questionable laws, you might not even be allowed to tell anybody that you now have to keep logs). At that point you have the choice of complying or going out of business. There might be individuals that will chose to go out of business (cf. Lavabit), but my faith in humanity is not big enough to trust anyone to make that decision.

The second issue is more economic: the internet was not really designed with security in mind and can be disrupted by malicious traffic. The providers you connect you will be pissed, if such traffic is coming out of your network and will expect you to stop it. If not, they'll refuse to peer with you and you might lose your provider status or even get disconnected from the internet, which would be the end of your business. You can try to implement technical measures, but this will also impact your other customers. The only real way to get customers to stop such behavior is to threaten to cut them off (and follow through with that if they do not comply). But to do that you need to identify the troublemakers and thus some kind of logging.

As best as I can tell, some manage to avoid any logs. They don't have any mechanism in place to prevent "abuse".

This can work for some time if the provider is small enough, but I would trust no one to be able to keep this up. I would rather have a clear description of how the logs are kept, when they are deleted and how legal inquiries are handled than a promise of no logs, that is likely to be broken in the future.
 
You don't need to trust your VPN provider not to sell your data in the future, you just need to trust them not to store user data now, so there's nothing to sell in the future.

'Trust' businesses? What, is this the 19th century?

But seriously, this is bad news for US-based browser companies, the obvious advice being to switch to an non-US-based browser company. (If you care about your privacy, that is.)
 
As best as I can tell, some manage to avoid any logs. They don't have any mechanism in place to prevent "abuse".

I think they keep at least 30 days for billing purposes and TOS violations. Some disallow torrenting and the like.
 
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