Republicans are stripping your online privacy rights, giving their big telecom donors the right to sell little pieces of information about you like your browsing history and financial transactions. Democrats haven’t been able to stop them, but plan to make Republicans pay for pushing through something it will be difficult to defend to voters:
“Voters across party lines understand the importance of personal privacy and are not going to be happy as they find out that Republican senators and Senate candidates used a party-line vote to put data including health and financial information for sale to the highest bidder," said Ben Ray, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
The stakes are only going to rise, as Republicans in Congress and at President Donald Trump's FCC turn their sights to the Obama-era net neutrality rules, which are designed to prevent internet providers from blocking, slowing or creating fast lanes for Web traffic.
"You saw what happened in just a few short days," Democratic former FCC aide Gigi Sohn said of Democrats' aggressive but ill-fated effort to block the GOP privacy measure. "This will be months and months and months of emails, phone calls, Twitter, Facebook, everything you can imagine."
Sens. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Dean Heller (R-NV), the two Republicans who are seen as potentially vulnerable in 2018, both voted against online privacy.