Congress votes to let ISPs sell browsing history

[ConstParam]

Even some of the more reputable VPN providers you have to be careful with. Take HideMyAss! for example. If you read their logging policy, you'll find they keep track of the following: connection time stamps, connection data transfer amount, your connection IP, VPN server IP. That's more than enough to uniquely identify you when needed. Add to that they fact they're based out of the UK, one of the world's foremost surveillance states, and you're not hiding from anyone.

 

[Mike64]

Even some of the more reputable VPN providers you have to be careful with. Take HideMyAss! for example. If you read their logging policy, you'll find they keep track of the following: connection time stamps, connection data transfer amount, your connection IP, VPN server IP. That's more than enough to uniquely identify you when needed. Add to that they fact they're based out of the UK, one of the world's foremost surveillance states, and you're not hiding from anyone.

But what do they do with it? Are they just selling it to anyone willing to pay for it? Personally, I couldn't care less about "law enforcement" (or frankly even garden variety "governmental") surveillance of myself. I'm not saying I approve of wholesale surveillance/monitoring of that sort, and history is replete with examples of that sort of behavior becoming abusive, quickly, no matter what race, color, creed, or political stripe the government in question is. But my real concern is the commercial aggregation of "consumer profiles". Things are bad enough as it is. Almost anyone willing to pay for it can find out anyone's entire work, residence, rough income/credit history, etc from the comfort of their web browser already. To say I have no interest in adding to that an extensive history (or even a statistical aggregation/analysis) of my web browsing and other Internet usage would be the understatement of the century. And at the risk of sounding like a parrot, the fact that it's being done by an entity I'm already paying through the nose for "services" is just adding a ridiculously contemptuous insult to a significant injury. Comparing ISPs to entities like Google, Yahoo, or Amazon is either just a sick joke (as in "ha, ha, look at the ridiculous nonsense some people are willing to believe just because we utter the magic words 'free market economy' over and over") or reflects a really almost terrifying fundamental lack of intelligence on the part of the legislators sponsoring and voting for this bullshit. Given the current political climate and crop of neo-con politicians, I'd be inclined to split my money evenly between those two bets, but who really knows...

Not that that last bit comes as any surprise, it's just more of the (darkly hilarious and) transparent, ludicrous corporate-person-loving "conservative" bullshit we've come to know and (so many of "us" adore), otherwise known as shoving our collective nose in a pile of steaming shit and telling us "it's supposed to smell like that..."

 

[JEDIYoda]

https://lifehacker.com/senate-votes-to-let-internet-providers-sell-your-web-hi-1793574677

This reminds me of the Verizon (and probably others) header tracking scandal which is injected into http packets to allow websites to track Verizon customers with a permanent cookie that is invisible to users.
https://www.wired.com/2014/10/verizons-perma-cookie/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh

One question I have is whether the Verizon injection of Unique Identifier Header, or UIDH into http packets is unique across all users sharing the same household router or do different people get different UIDH?

tell me it ain`t so......

 

[ngocnghith2]

I think that that method of spamming ad clicks works better with a browser history that has already been to many different websites to build up a whole lot of nonsense data that ad companies can't decipher.

 

[daveybrat]

I think that that method of spamming ad clicks works better with a browser history that has already been to many different websites to build up a whole lot of nonsense data that ad companies can't decipher.

And then in the mean time you get infected by clicking on bad ads. Makes sense.......

 

[Mike64]

to build up a whole lot of nonsense data that ad companies can't decipher.

Dream on... the data might not accurately reflect your purchasing habits, but for a few reasons, it will by no means be "un-analyze-able nonsense" and it will then all just end up in whatever profiles are aggregated by various entities, which really isn't very helpful, from my persepctive anyway...