MAKING A BUCK ON OUR INTERNET PRIVACY

By Robert P. Bomboy

I had a great time on my birthday last week (though I'll not say how many miles I have on my odometer) but, at the end of the day, I realized there was something bad in the air.

            That very day, March 23, the flim-flam artists in Congress had a party of their own, tearing up the Bill of Rights and the special privacy of us all.

            It's about the Internet.

            At the same time that America was distracted by the imbroglio over the Affordable Care Act, the boys and girls in the House of Representatives and the Senate were carrying water for Big Business - Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and the other Internet Service Providers who want to make a very big and secret profit using what they know about us.

Internet Service Providers have already collected all of our Internet activity -- our browser history, search queries, and location data (including continuous information from our phones) -- a lot more than any single online advertiser or platform has. Those nice folks who make the Internet available to us (for a hefty price) have a complete history of our online personas -- that is, who we are and who we say we are online.
 

What they have, about Americans, is:

·   Medical conditions, from searches

·   Sexual preferences, from pornography

·   Gender preferences and identities

·   Financial overviews of our lives

·   Our political alignment

·   Our religious beliefs

Now, with what Congress did in the past 10 days, they've made it legal for Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and the others, using this very complete information about our Internet lives, to get even richer - the richest one percent I talked about last Monday - by creating profiles of each of us and putting them up for sale to any corporation or government willing to pay top dollar. This could lead to vastly wider surveillance and discrimination based on a person's race, religion, gender identity, financial situation, or medical condition.

Want to know the background?

Candidate and President Trump worked his tonsils raw about getting rid of government regulations, including this consumer-protection by the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC set up rules protecting your data and preventing the Internet boys from doing all the things I've just mentioned, especially preventing them from selling our Internet browsing records without our consent.

Big Data - that's what it's called - didn't like that one bit, so they hired half the lobbyists on K Street to work over all our senators and representatives kill the rules that were protecting us.

And that's what Congress did - on a partisan vote last Tuesday the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted almost unanimously - 215 of them (no Democrat voted for it)- to do the dirty deed. The Senate had already voted, so the limp loser that was once our Internet privacy went off like a bullet train to be signed into law by the man in the White House who started it all.

And in the House of Big Data there was, in every room, the thunderous roar of corks popping and champagne being poured.

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