How Silicon Valley’s Dirty Tricks Helped Stall Broadband Privacy in California
Tech, including Facebook and Google, lent their support to a host of misleading scare tactics.
Wolf here: After the US Congress repealed restrictions earlier this year, your broadband provider (ISPs such as Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T) can monetize your private data. ISPs know practically everything you do on the internet, and they know who you are and have your credit data from credit bureaus such as Equifax. California tried to pass legislation that would have reinstated some of those protections. So this is not just about a legislative defeat of internet privacy in California, but about how lobbyists for the tech industry in general operate.
As this succeeded in California — via falsehoods and national security scaremongering — the campaign is now heading to other state legislatures because the industry wants to monetize all your data in a world where you and your data are the product.
By Ernesto Falcon, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Across the country, state lawmakers are fighting to restore the Internet privacy rights of their constituents that Congress and the President misguidedly repealed earlier this year. The facts and public opinion are on their side, but the recent battle to pass California’s broadband privacy bill, A.B. 375, suggests that they will face a massive misinformation campaign launched by the telecom lobby and, sadly, joined by major tech companies.
The tech industry lent their support to a host of misleading scare tactics.
Big Telco’s opposition was hardly surprising. It was, after all, their lobbying efforts in Washington D.C. that repealed the privacy obligations they had to their customers. But it’s disappointing that after mostly staying out of the debate, Google and Facebook joined in opposing the restoration of broadband privacy for Californians despite the bill doing nothing about their core business models (the bill was explicitly about restoring ISP privacy rules).
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