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Congress to Strip FCC Regulations on Online Privacy: Protect your Browsing!

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  • 4 min read

If you haven’t figured this out yet, the orange-tinted Congress of the United States doesn’t have the needs of common citizens in mind. The most obvious of this is the current efforts to strip the FCC requirements for the safeguarding of customer browsing data. Congress is currently working to strip these requirements so that corporations can make more money off on selling your data, all offering you nothing in return. Not even the option to opt out of this.

Let’s look at this closely and figure out what you can do to protect yourself. The pumpkin-inspired Congress does not have your best interest at heart. You’re going to have to learn how to take care of yourself online.

Congress to strip the SEC regulations protecting you online

What exactly is going on?

A resolution was passed in Congress that is looking to roll back privacy laws enacted by former President Barack Obama. This was put forward by Sen. Jeff Flake and Rep. Marsha Blackburn. They are looking to eliminate requirements introduced during the Obama administration which required ISPs to get customer permission before selling off their user data.

 

Sen. Flake thought he was cute when he said of his bill:

“It empowers consumers to make informed choices on if and how their data can be shared.”

This is classic doublespeak as it does not actually give people the choice; it forces a choice on them. It will make things like that so that your ISP never has to ask you a single question about whether or not you’re information is collected and sold off to whoever has the money to purchase it.

What was President Obama trying to protect?

The FCC rules that President Obama had passed were looking to protect these seven parts of your online browsing habits:

  1. Financial and health datapublic wifi security
  2. Geo-location data
  3. Information about your children
  4. Social security numbers
  5. App use
  6. Communications
  7. Web browsing history

The requirement that your ISP should obtain specific approval from you before sharing any of these details was included. How much of these details do you want to be shared with anyone who feels like paying for them? How much of these details do you want to be taken by anyone who feels like stealing them from those who paid for them? Somewhere in these seven points is the information that you want to be private. This is a nonpartisan issue; protecting this information is important.

How can you protect this information from your ISP?

Your ISP gains this information when it spies on your connection through its servers. It can access any of the information from the seven points above and record it, and then sell it on two data miners and companies that are looking to market to you more effectively. It all comes down to money changing hands; it doesn’t do anything for you.

There’s only one way that you can protect yourself. You need to choose a VPN provider that will encrypt your online activity so that your ISP you cannot record in the first place. You’re also going to want to choose a logless VPN if protecting your information is truly important to you. The top three that I would recommend are:

These three VPN providers are renowned for their incredible privacy policies. They can easily protect you from having your data collected by your ISP, preventing you from risk due to the FCC online privacy regulations being stripped.