jgillula

If the repeal passes, it'll mean three things. First, it'll mean that your Internet provider will be able to spy on your traffic and sell your data to marketers--so all the creepy tracking you already see online will get turned up to eleven.

Second, it means you might see a lot more ads, including ads you won't be able to block. (That's because current adblockers block ads by blocking data from specific domains. Your Internet provider could insert the ads directly into your traffic, making it much, much harder to block the ads.)

Third, it means your security is going to get a lot worse. Internet providers have "accidentally" published personal information that wasn't supposed to before, and there's no reason to think their security is going to get any better. In fact, they recently succeeded in killing a rule that would have required them to take "reasonable" security precautions to protect your data.

And by injecting ads, Internet providers could break the websites you view--including their security features.

Great question!

A lot of the FUD Internet provider lobbyists are spreading about why this repeal is necessary revolves around the myth that the privacy rules put Internet providers at an unfair disadvantage when compared to Internet companies like Google who can profit off of consumers’ data.

But Google doesn’t see everything you do on the Internet (neither does Facebook, for that matter, or any other online platform)—they only see the traffic you send to them. And you can always choose to use a different search engine if you want to avoid Google’s tracking. None of that is true about your Internet provider. You probably only have one, maybe two options when it comes to broadband Internet, and your Internet provider sees everything—they have to, in order to send your traffic to the right place. That’s why we need the FCC’s privacy rules: Internet providers can see and alter all of your traffic, which gives them power that no other company has over your connection--and they've shown they're willing to abuse that power.

Plus, if you’re worried about creepy third-party tracking online, you can use free tools to protect yourself; the only way to protect your privacy from your Internet provider is to pay for a VPN or use Tor.

Your Internet provider could definitely sell your data individually. (Though to be perfectly honest, they're unlikely to--they see the info they amass on you as their secret sauce, and they're unlikely to want to let it get out, because then they can't keep making money off of it.)

Fortunately, the rules will only affect U.S. Internet providers like Comcast, Cox, or Time-Warner and their customers.

The best thing non-U.S. Internet users can do right now is drum up attention. Obviously non-U.S. Internet users can't call their congressperson, but by tweeting about this issue or posting it to social media--especially the following link, which people can use to call their congressmember https://act.eff.org/action/don-t-let-congress-undermine-our-online-privacy --you can raise awareness, and get more people in the U.S. to see what's going and call their lawmakers.

And of course, if you have any friends in the U.S., tell them directly!

We still have a shot at killing this thing, but only if we melt Congress's phone lines on Monday.

The short answer is: yep, ISPs could sell personally identifiable information if they wanted.

The long answer is that technically, the repeal would just roll back rules that protect your info. This includes PII, but also:

(1) financial information; (2) health information; (3) information pertaining to children; (4) Social Security numbers; (5) precise geo-location information; (6) content of communications; (7) call detail information; and (8) web browsing history, application usage history, and the functional equivalents of either.

So if the repeal succeeds, ISPs could share all of that information.