One year ago, President Trump signed legislation repealing a Federal Communications Commission regulation that would have forced Internet service providers to seek customer consent before selling their browsing data to advertisers.
The ISPs and Republicans in Congress had argued it was unfair to shackle companies such as Comcast and Verizon with an opt-in rule when Facebook and Google had no such limits on turning user data into ad revenue.
That argument is losing appeal as lawmakers respond to British company Cambridge Analytica using Facebook data surreptitiously taken from nearly 90 million accounts for 2016 election targeting.
“I think the dam is broken,” said Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that advocates for user control over browsing data. “The question becomes, what are legislatures going to do?”
Last year, the EFF supported unsuccessful state efforts to pass ISP privacy bills. In California, the effort died amid concern about the effect on companies such as Facebook. Falcon believes that’s no longer a concern, but a selling point.
“It’s made privacy personal again,” Falcon said. “There’s no reason to not think there are other Cambridge Analyticas out there that will use ISPs in the exact same way as Facebook.”
Falcon believes bills creating privacy rules for ISPs and companies such as Facebook and Google “are going to be inextricably linked” as “people are going to feel it’s incomplete to move on privacy for one without the other.”
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Facebook panic returns focus to Internet providers selling your browsing data https://t.co/hGwLQGrB7u pic.twitter.com/3nEEK4bVPv
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) April 17, 2018
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