Under the Obama administration, telecommunications companies were not allowed to collect and sell browser history or other data from smart phones. The new Donald Trump administration has reversed those regulations, freeing personal data to be sold at will.
Data From a Truck
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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«Under the Obama administration, telecommunications companies were not allowed to collect and sell browser history or other data from smart phones.» Ah, but Ted, you’re missing an important point – that, regulatory package, which would have required ISPs in the US to notify users there if someone hacked their data and to get users active permission before selling your data, was only proposed in October last year and would have come into effect first last month ; i e, only after the Obama administration had passed into history or wherever defunct administrations go…..
The distinction between the Obama administration and that of Mr Trump would seem to be that the latter doesn’t use Vaseline….
Henri
Obama delayed taking measures that would go against the wishes of the Capitalist Power Elite and would further disillusion (if that was still possible) the people he cleverly mislead into voting for him.
Obama allowed environmental travesties such as the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipeline to proceed to near completion, while posing as an environmentalist for election purposes, then letting Trump take the inevitable hit for their inevitable approval by him.
Obama allowed deep water oil wells and new nuclear power plants to go online, capitalizing on the conditioned response of liberal forgiveness for all things identity-political.
For the great majority of his terms he allowed things abhorrent to justice and the environment, only weakly taking positions late in his final days as president, these surely to be overturned by the next administration.
It’s disgusting and I hate it, but it’s nothing new. Back in the day of paper catalogues the various companies would gleefully sell your info to anyone who asked. Income, buying habits, phone number, ages & sexes of the people there, etc. Even if you had an unlisted number it was still in a phone book available only to businesses.
Now, by law, businesses have to have a ‘privacy statement’ – ever read one? It states in no uncertain terms that they can give your private info to anyone they damn please. Calling it a ‘privacy’ statement is positively Orwellian. You can ask them nicely to sell your info. The last time I tried I was told that it was a 45 minute wait to get through to the people who would listen to me say that which should be obvious in the first place. Instead, I cancelled the credit card – that took only two minutes.
I saw a great commercial once that summed it up nicely. A young man & woman are flirting at a bar and she eventually gives him her phone number. The bartender says, “Hey, I’ll give you five bucks for that” then another patron comes up with money in hand. The man is obviously happy to be making money while the woman looks on with a shocked expression.
You can ask them nicely NOT to sell your info.
heh. heh heh. I blame auto-correct.
« You can ask them nicely to sell your info.»
…
«You can ask them nicely NOT to sell your info.
heh. heh heh. I blame auto-correct.»
Since, as you point out, CrazyH, the end result is one and the same, why worry about the presence or absence of a negative particle ?… 😉
Henri
Here’s the reality. Somewhere out there is a company that has a list of “aggregated data” so granular that I could call up and say, “Yeah. I need a list of all the left-handed Muslim men in Oklahoma who have a history of having purchased X-large dildos or vibrators.” And the response on the other end? “Do you have a cut-off point for annual income? We can give that to you in $20K brackets up to $200K, at which point it’s just $200K+. And do you want all of Oklahoma or just the five largest zip codes?”
«Somewhere out there is a company that has a list of “aggregated data” so granular that I could call up and say, “Yeah. I need a list of all the left-handed Muslim men in Oklahoma who have a history of having purchased X-large dildos or vibrators.”» Ah, but Alex, can they distinguish between those Muslim male residents of Oklahoma who write with their left hands, and those who really are left-handed, but write with their right hand because they were forced to do so as children ? Now that would be real granularity !… 😉
Henri
Once again I have to say: “I’m glad to be in Mexico!”
Do you think that my use of a proxy service when I access otherwise unavailable sites gives those creeps access to my information?
a-yup. (and don’t forget that the proxy service knows who you are and where you go.)
The end recipient won’t get your IP address, and they should get your proxy’s location rather than yours. So you’ve got that at least.
If you get into the proxy via your usual ISP, they can see all the traffic that goes through. Even if it’s encrypted the carriers themselves can figure a lot out. “hmmm, der Lehrer logged into a proxy, sent a 2k packet in, and a moment later a 2k packet went out to lamaporn.com; which replied with a 500k packet, and a moment later a 500k packet left the proxy for der Lehrer’s place…”
I’ve used an anonymizer service in Europe or Asia. They are a proxy service, but pull other tricks like delaying the packets or maybe even adding some padding so they aren’t the same size. Some will bounce your traffic off of other intermediate servers so it’s harder to trace. It won’t stop the NSA, but it keeps me warm & happy when I go trolling on RWNJ sites.
I use Hola! at present. It’s a free service.
I paid for a different one for a few years, but I can’t remember what it was called. They were identified by the sites I visited, such as “The Colbert Report” (via hulu.com) and I stopped using them because there was no longer an advantage and there was an annual charge.
There is one out of Germany that changes the ISP each and every time you use it, bouncing around so that no one can say definitively where the user is located. I might have to download that software, especially in view of the fact that when I want to view a yahoo.com video the service detects that I am using a proxy and when I turn it off I get the message that the video is “Not Available In Your Location.” Bummer!
> “Not Available In Your Location…”
Yeah, that is a pain – the sites where you most want to cloak your identity don’t want you to cloak your identity. … or so I’ve been told.
BTW, I apologize for insinuating that you were into lama porn. I meant “llama” of course. >:-D