Irreal

Yesterday, in my post about AT&T, Time Warner, and the Iron Law of Data Collection, I complained that in all whining about what an unfair advantage AT&T/Time Warner would have in advertising, little notice was taken of the fact that the data in question doesn’t belong to AT&T, it belongs to their users. In a rare victory for consumers (at least here in the U.S.) the FCC has agreed and passed a regulation to the effect that ISPs and carriers can not sell or use consumers’ viewing information without their permission.

Naturally, the media and communication companies are upset and we will doubtlessly see law suits and lobbying to try to get the ruling overturned. It doesn’t go into effect for a year so consumers may never see the benefits of the ruling. That would be a shame. The carriers are all in on the common carrier provisions that let them regard the information they’re carrying as an opaque bit stream for whose content they can’t be held responsible. But ask them to please not spy on that bit stream and suddenly it’s valuable proprietary information.

But I shouldn’t be peevish. At least for now consumers can expect to enjoy a little bit of privacy and the ownership of their viewing and communication habits.

UPDATE [2016-10-29 Sat 13:55]: The FCC has a fact sheet about the ruling.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about the Iron Law of Data Collection. That’s the idea that when the Government collects data, regardless of the stated rationale, there will inevitably be mission creep that sees the data being used in new, unintended ways and that it always leads to abuse. It turns out that the law applies to organizations other than the government.

In the same post linked above, I noted that If the data is there, anyone with an interest in exploiting it will demand access. Those interests are not limited to law enforcement and public safety concerns. Media companies plan to ask U.S. regulators to force AT&T to share the huge store of customer use data that they’ve been collecting since 1987 through their Hemisphere program. Although the data is often shared with law enforcement, without warrant but for a fee, the purpose of the Hemisphere program is to monetize that data.

With AT&T’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner, media companies are whining that the data will give AT&T/Time Warner an unfair advantage in targeted advertisements and are demanding that regulators force AT&T/Time Warner to share that data with them. Notice how the notion that that data doesn’t really belong to ATT&T in the first place—it’s the viewing/texting/calling history of its customers—doesn’t come into play here. The data is there, it’s exploitable, and all the players are demanding access.

In a just world, it would be against the law to collect (or at least to store indefinitely) that information but then law enforcement would have to deal with getting those pesky warrants when it wanted to check on whom we’ve been communicating with. Worse, the other carriers, who do periodically purge their records, will see their customer data as exploitable and also begin storing it long term.

It’s the iron law. Once that data is collected it will be used in ways that we find objectionable. The only solution, as I say in every iron law post, is to prevent that collection in the first place. The carriers should collect that data only for billing purposes and purge it as soon as the bill is paid. Of course, that’s not going to happen because exploitable.

If you were surprised by this

This past summer Google quietly dropped its historic ban on merging Web browsing info with your name.https://t.co/TRgREtYvaO

— Julia Angwin (@JuliaAngwin) October 21, 2016

you haven’t been paying attention.

Google is in the business of collecting information about you and selling it to advertisers. That imperative informs just about everything they do. You can think of “Don’t be evil” as a sunny Norman Rockwell painting of a world that probably never existed and certainly doesn’t now.

I long ago switched to DuckDuckGo for my web searching and you’d be wise to do likewise. Likewise, I use Gmail only as a forwarder for technical mailing lists so Google probably knows I’m a geek. I try to limit their knowledge to that.

pic.twitter.com/WKWGdZZo8m

— Defective by Design (@endDRM) August 10, 2016