Campaign Action
While the nation was distracted by the House Republican's slow meltdown over Trumpcare last week, the Senate was doing dastardly deeds, destroying your online privacy in a partisan vote. Using the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law that gives Congress the authority to review newly issued federal regulations and overrule them in an expedited process. They're going gangbusters on this one, cutting down late Obama administration regulations as fast as they can, and this one is particularly pernicious.
Last year the FCC passed a set of rules for how ISPs deal with their customers’ data. The commonsense rules updated longstanding federal protections for Internet users. Under the rules, ISPs would be required to protect your data and wouldn’t be allowed to do a host of creepy things, including sell your Internet browsing records without your consent.
Those rules were a huge victory for consumers. Of course, the ISPs that stand to make money off of violating your privacy have been lobbying Congress to repeal those rules. Unfortunately, their anti-consumer push has been working. [...]
If the House passes it, you’ll be even more at the mercy of your ISP. Because Congress is using a CRA resolution, the FCC will be prohibited from writing similar rules in the future. And thanks to the current legal landscape, no other federal agency has the authority to protect you against privacy invasions by your ISP.
Those creepy things? EFF has the list: Selling your data to marketers; hijacking your searches; snooping through your traffic and inserting ads; pre-installing software on your phone and recording every URL you visit; and injecting undetectable, undeletable tracking cookies in all of your HTTP traffic. All of these were practices internet providers routinely used before the regulation. That’s why the FCC created this rule in the first place. It’s going to happen again unless we defeat it.
The House is set to vote on this on Tuesday, hoping to rush it through while we’re celebrating a Trumpcare victory. We can stop them, as Trumpcare’s defeat demonstrates. They need to get as many calls about this as they did about Trumpcare. Your online privacy could be a thing of the past, forever.