BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is away this week. I’m Bob Garfield.
The first 100 days of the Trump administration have been something like the White House bowling alley. [SOUND OF PINS] The Obama administration hurled regulations aimed at protecting the public and now, almost automatically in the name of undoing executive overreach, they’re rollin’ right back. [SOUND OF PINS] The White House has even undertaken to permit no new regulations unless two older ones are erased from the books. The latest rollback concerns online privacy. After a vote in the House on Tuesday, the President's signature will reverse rules that later this year would have governed user data, namely –
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MALE CORRESPONDENT: They would have required Internet service providers to ask permission if they wanted to track your information, information including your browsing history, your location, even your app use.
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: It means your entire digital footprint, any medical questions you might look for answers to online, online searches, even your private emails could be sold to third parties.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: Users were given the right to privacy so that their data could not be sold without their permission to advertisers and others by broadband providers. But under the new rules your ISP – Comcast, Verizon, Cox, AT&T, whomever - can freely sell your data. This week's vote was done under the Congressional Review Act, an obscure and rarely-used way to undo agency regulations passed during the waning months of a previous administration. And here’s the twist: Under the law, once a new rule is revoked, that agency cannot ever make it or anything similar to it again.
CHRIS CALABRESE: Right now, right now there is essentially no federal regulator for how this data will be handled by ISPs.
BOB GARFIELD: Chris Calabrese is policy vice president at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
CHRIS CALABRESE: The regulator that governs Google and Facebook, the Federal Trade Commission, has no authority over ISPs. They are barred by federal law from regulating what are called common carriers, so they can't actually regulate what Comcast or Verizon does in this context. So we don't know what consumers are going to be given in terms of rights, we really don't.
BOB GARFIELD: The rules that the Obama administration FCC imposed haven’t even taken effect, but the theory was that our own data, that which we generate, belongs to us. And that has, obviously, been flipped, and now the data under this law seems to belong to whosever carrying it, kind of like if a trucking company took ownership of the goods that it was driving from state to state. Is there any way to understand this legislation, apart from a big fat gift basket to the ISPs?
CHRIS CALABRESE: You know, I, I think it's hard to really see this as a [LAUGHS] consumer benefit. The reality is that consumers are constantly asking for more control over their information. They're worried about where it's going. Poll after poll shows that people don't like these take-it-or-leave-it privacy policies, for example. I mean, I think some of the companies present this as a, a major regulatory burden or saying, you know, we, we need to be lifted from the, the shackles of having controls over this information. And so, that may be the perspective that the administration thought they were getting into, well, this will be, you know, one less regulation.
I think, in this case, this is a regulation that serves a very useful and important purpose and one that people like and agree with.
BOB GARFIELD: Matt Stoller, a fellow at the New America Foundation, even found protest bubbling up in the Comments section of Breitbart –
[CALABRESE LAUGHS]
- which is the, the Trump administration’s wheelhouse.
CHRIS CALABRESE: I think most consumers are saying, well, I’d like to be the one who decides what information about me gets out there and, and who it gets shared with. You could certainly see a benefit to big advertisers. For example, one of the things that advertisers are always looking for is more information on their consumers. They’re looking to be able to figure out if when someone saw an ad, where they saw it and if it led directly to them purchasing a product. It's much easier to draw that kind of value line if you have this kind of detailed viewpoint into people's behaviors and patterns.
BOB GARFIELD: Give me an example of the kind of targeted advertising that we might see on the basis of our data being commodified like this?
CHRIS CALABRESE: Well, I mean, one thing that we have seen already and I think could be exacerbated under this is last year we saw people who entered individual Planned Parenthood clinics being offered anti-abortion ads, literally as they were sitting in the clinic. These were geo-tagged, so they were aimed at people in a particular location. And, you know, that’s something that's legal now. ISPs could use that same technology to offer these kind of very distinct and different ads and, probably more troubling, they could collect information about the people who were in those clinics and do other things with it, which I think a lot of people would be very nervous about.
BOB GARFIELD: So it's the same technology that allows me to go into a Wendy's or something and automatically have a coupon for a Frosty sent to my phone.
CHRIS CALABRESE: You got it.
BOB GARFIELD: It enables advertisers, really, to peek into parts of my life that I don't prefer to have an open book.
CHRIS CALABRESE: That’s exactly right, and that’s exactly why we want to give consumers the choice here, because they may well be happy to have that coupon but still not want to have people record when they're in a doctor's office or a church or a gun shop, or anywhere else.
BOB GARFIELD: It’s not as though I can, you know, go up to a teller window at Comcast and buy your search history, right? Yeah, here’s 100 dollars, I’d like to know where Chris Calabrese has searched in, in the last 24 hours, right?
CHRIS CALABRESE: The reality is that's not illegal. I just think they would not do it as a matter of practice. Companies know better than to put their customers’ identifiable personal searching habits out online for sale.
BOB GARFIELD: So those people who are signing petitions to buy Donald Trump’s search history, they’re, they’re not going to get satisfaction, are they?
CHRIS CALABRESE: You know, that's a good thing. Even if we’re frustrated by, you know, Congress’s actions or the President's actions, I don't want to live in a world where it's possible to buy my search history online, and I want companies and individuals to think that's a bad thing.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, Chris, thank you so much.
CHRIS CALABRESE: Sure, good to talk to you.
BOB GARFIELD: Chris Calabrese is policy vice president at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
