privacy

What is the simple key to passing bipartisan net neutrality and online privacy legislation?

Donny Kendal and John Nothdurft are back in episode #165 of the In The Tank Podcast. This weekly podcast features (as always) interviews, debates, and roundtable discussions that explore the work of think tanks across the country. The show is available for download as part of the Heartland Daily Podcast every Friday. 

Americans want their right to privacy restored.

Thanks, but no thanks, federal government. You can keep your programs, and we’ll keep our data to ourselves.

The FCC’s Open Internet order and proposed Title II privacy rules divided what was unified. For privacy, it broke what was working. Confused what was clear. Complicated what was simple. Unprotected what they sought to protect. Created more costs than benefits. Since the Internet’s beginning the FTC has had privacy authority over information services.

With due credit to “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!®,”so much odd and bizarre is happening at the FCC in the “name” of “privacy” that the topic calls for its own collection of: “Believe it or Not!®” oddities.

Since Google chose that apt metaphor, and boasted about how easy Google makes it to “check out” your private data and “leave” to a competitor, lets test if you can ever “in fact leave” Google-Eye’s pervasively invasive online surveillance — from a privacy perspective.

Why does the company that by far collects the most private information that the FCC claims it wants to protect, and that also has the worst consumer privacy protection record with the FTC, (Google), get 99% exempted from the telecom and cable privacy protections expected of telephone, broadband, cable and satellite providers?

When one’s actions demonstrably create a worse rather than better outcome net-net, like the FCC’s new Title II ISP privacy policy does, others would justifiably consider it a mistake.

In this episode of The Heartland Daily Podcast, managing editor Jesse Hathaway talks with Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Sophia Cope about the Federal District Court for the District of Central California’s recent demand that Apple, the $700 billion tech company producing consumer products like the iPhone and iPad, assist the Federal Bureau of Investigations with their investigation into the December 2, 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack by devising a way to unlock the deceased terrorist’s iPhone without a password.

In arbitrarily applying Title II telecommunications rules to only the ISP half of Internet communications, while politically exempting the entire edge half of Internet communications in its Open Internet order, the FCC has ensured that information that was proprietary and controllable in the closed telephone world becomes public and uncontrollable in the open Internet world.

How the FTC handles the EFF petition charging that Google has violated its enforceable pledge to protect K-12 students’ privacy will speak volumes to the world about two big things.

The U.S. government’s Internet priorities in Europe are upside down. It has chosen bits over bodies, prioritizing protecting the neutrality of innumerable inanimate Internet bits over protecting peoples’ privacy and personal data.