So take away legal fiction “1st amendment protections” for corporations, if they pull these stunts! We The People are the masters, not faceless corporate.
Governments also should never sell our data without opt-in.
That’s a road you don’t want to go down. If they can take it away from corporations, they can take it away from you. We need to look into other ways to stop them from doing it, or only support companies that don’t.
As Coretta Scott King said many years ago; This country has no future unless it frees itself from two basic falsehoods-that money is speech and that corporations are citizens.
Pretending that corporations are citizens, and not the simple organisms that consume money and excrete pollution that they are is to guarantee that citizens rights and freedoms will be eroded and eventually eliminated.
I am an absolutist when it comes to free speech. I think that yes you do have a right to shout fire in a theatre, as long as you are willing to face the consequences for your actions. But I see this as an absolute abuse of the concept of free speech. That a corporation can take real people’s information, and sell it to anyone without having to ask permission is a total abuse.
Money is, of course, not speech. I don’t see people arguing that it is, other than as a straw man. The Supreme Court certainly hasn’t said that money is speech, To the contrary, the Court has suggested that it isn’t. The government can, for instance, limit monetary contributions to political candidates.
I'm familiar with the Citizens United decision, I've read it multiple times.
It doesn't say that money is speech. That's a characterization that critics often use to characterize the Supreme Court's position (in Citizens United and other cases) in order to make it easier to criticize that position. Money isn't speech but, as I indicated, the right to spend money to facilitate speech is necessarily a part of the free speech right. If the government could prohibit you from spending money to facilitate your speech, it could effectively prohibit you from speaking.
The court found corporations can spend to influence elections, because restricting their spending is restricting their speech. Thus in this context they ruled money is speech, and granted them the ability to spend far more than an ordinary citizen can.
Pretending corporations are people when it is advantageous to do so, but giving it non-person privileges when it is not, is a problem.
So take away legal fiction “1st amendment protections” for corporations, if they pull these stunts! We The People are the masters, not faceless corporate.
Governments also should never sell our data without opt-in.
In your dreams. Face reality. Freedom is not free. To replace the revenue from selling our data the ISPs will simply raise their rates to compensate. I don't think I want the government to take over and operate ISPs or any other enterprise.
What on earth does this have to do with freedom? ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to sell private data. Fine let them charge more if they feel they need to - and let competitors who don’t feel they need to, charge less and win in the marketplace.
This crap is exacrlybwhy regulation exists.
Agree, but it is a two edged sword. Big corporations lobby for and then enjoy regulatory protection against new entrants. Become even bigger pricks, and lawyer politicians enjoy additional regulation against new entrants. Virtuous circle. Fir them. The problem with regulation is it can be too easily abused and subject to lobbying, earmarking legislation, etc etc. that said, regulation for this would be decent regulation as long as it was kept simple and straightforward, and focussed on one of the original purposes of government, the protection of property. Your data. Your property.
I'm curious if we permit this by the ISP's when we contract for service? Is it buried somewhere in the TOS? FWIW I don't recall ever seeing one but can't swear I didn't receive it and toss it aside. Any have a copy from their internet service provider? IIRC we had the same issue with our cell service providers who were doing the same thing.
They may have free speech and a first amendment right over their own Data. But there are also privacy laws for all the people they are trying to sell that data on. We the people, if we want to protect our own privacy, we should be able to also. I have the right to keep my Data personal and not be sold to the highest bidder. Just because someone else has access to my Data, doesn't give them the right to just sell my Data. They are free to sell their own Data if they want, so long as it has nothing to do with ME, or any other customer that doesn't want their data sold. We are already getting screwed by these company's in high fee's and caps.
So take away legal fiction “1st amendment protections” for corporations, if they pull these stunts! We The People are the masters, not faceless corporate.
Governments also should never sell our data without opt-in.
That’s a road you don’t want to go down. If they can take it away from corporations, they can take it away from you. We need to look into other ways to stop them from doing it, or only support companies that don’t.
Corporations aren't people. They are a legal fiction. You can't lock one in prison. You can forcibly dissolve one, but not kill it, as the people who make it up can always go and found another substantially-identical corporation.
This is very much a road we as a society should want to go down.
We all know BS when we see it. This isn’t “speech”, it’s not a view or an opinion or any expression of the ISP they are simply selling their customer’s private data. Unfortunately the US doesn’t enjoy the same kind of free market for internet service as other countries - or rather it’s the free market that large corporates (that fund politicians) love but no consumer benefits from. Once you’ve unbundled the local loop you’ll get proper competition - and this problem will disappear.
So take away legal fiction “1st amendment protections” for corporations, if they pull these stunts! We The People are the masters, not faceless corporate.
Governments also should never sell our data without opt-in.
That’s a road you don’t want to go down. If they can take it away from corporations, they can take it away from you. We need to look into other ways to stop them from doing it, or only support companies that don’t.
As Coretta Scott King said many years ago; This country has no future unless it frees itself from two basic falsehoods-that money is speech and that corporations are citizens.
Pretending that corporations are citizens, and not the simple organisms that consume money and excrete pollution that they are is to guarantee that citizens rights and freedoms will be eroded and eventually eliminated.
I am an absolutist when it comes to free speech. I think that yes you do have a right to shout fire in a theatre, as long as you are willing to face the consequences for your actions. But I see this as an absolute abuse of the concept of free speech. That a corporation can take real people’s information, and sell it to anyone without having to ask permission is a total abuse.
Money is, of course, not speech. I don’t see people arguing that it is, other than as a straw man. The Supreme Court certainly hasn’t said that money is speech, To the contrary, the Court has suggested that it isn’t. The government can, for instance, limit monetary contributions to political candidates.
I'm familiar with the Citizens United decision, I've read it multiple times.
It doesn't say that money is speech. That's a characterization that critics often use to characterize the Supreme Court's position (in Citizens United and other cases) in order to make it easier to criticize that position. Money isn't speech but, as I indicated, the right to spend money to facilitate speech is necessarily a part of the free speech right. If the government could prohibit you from spending money to facilitate your speech, it could effectively prohibit you from speaking.
The court found corporations can spend to influence elections, because restricting their spending is restricting their speech. Thus in this context they ruled money is speech, and granted them the ability to spend far more than an ordinary citizen can.
Pretending corporations are people when it is advantageous to do so, but giving it non-person privileges when it is not, is a problem.
Then, by that reasoning, money is an abortion and money is a lawyer and money is the exercise of religion. You have the right to spend money to facilitate your speech not because money is speech, but because you often need to spend money in order to exercise your right to speak. The same is true for many of our constitutional rights. But spending money to do or acquire X doesn't make money that X. Money is money; it's used to do or get things. As I said, the money is speech misnomer is used to make it easier to criticize a concept which, when it's fairly considered, is quite reasonable and I think undeniably correct. Of course the government can't stop you from spending money to, e.g., buy a computer you'll use to post criticism of the President on the internet or buy paper and ink you'll use to make flyers advocating for his electoral defeat. You have the right to speak so, necessarily you have the right to spend money on that speech.
As for the corporation part, yes, corporations - i.e., people acting through or on behalf of corporations, or people associating in corporate form - have the right to speak and thus have the right to spend money to speak. They don't, however, have the right to contribute money to political candidates or parties.
We don't often, for legal purposes, consider corporations to be people because we actually think corporations are humans. We do it because the actions of corporations represent the actions of people. A corporation can be thought of as either of two things: (1) an association of people or (2) something which people use. Corporations don't exist naturally and don't act other than at the direction of humans; they don't act of their own volition. We wouldn't say that the local biker club doesn't have the constitutional right to speak because it isn't a person but rather an association of people. Also, we wouldn't say that a billboard doesn't have the right to say something because it isn't a person. It, of course, isn't a person. But it's used by people to say something and they have rights - to include the right to use a billboard to say something.
Fundamentally it's the rights of people that are at issue when we consider the rights of corporations. We don't lose our constitutional rights just because we associate with others in various forms. We have long recognized that corporations, in effect, have constitutional rights. It was fairly recently that the Supreme Court changed tack and denied the political speech rights of corporations. Citizens United put us back where we'd historically been when it comes to the rights of corporations.
As for the legal privileges we give corporations, that's a legitimate issue of consideration. But governments often, in different contexts, give different entities and people privileges. That's not a valid reason to deny those entities or people basic constitutional rights. We give those privileges because we supposedly think it's beneficial to society to do so, that's also why we give the people who own corporations limited liability. If we want to not give such privileges, fine. But we don't get to say you lose your constitutional rights because you're given something by the government.
The ramifications of a change whereby we legally considered people to lose their constitutional rights when they acted in connection with corporations would be huge. They'd be unthinkable. Do we really not want MSNBC or Fox News or Huffington Post to have a constitutional right to criticize politicians or advocate political policies? An incorporated publisher shouldn't have the constitutional right to print bibles?
So take away legal fiction “1st amendment protections” for corporations, if they pull these stunts! We The People are the masters, not faceless corporate.
Governments also should never sell our data without opt-in.
In your dreams. Face reality. Freedom is not free. To replace the revenue from selling our data the ISPs will simply raise their rates to compensate. I don't think I want the government to take over and operate ISPs or any other enterprise.
So how much is your data worth, $5 per month, per day? You value your personal data so little that you give it away for pennies and your fear of ANY government regulation to stop these data thieves is unlimited. So naive to think an ISP cares about you other than to exploit anything and everything they can cull about you and improve their bottom line.
I'm curious if we permit this by the ISP's when we contract for service? Is it buried somewhere in the TOS? FWIW I don't recall ever seeing one but can't swear I didn't receive it and toss it aside. Any have a copy from their internet service provider? IIRC we had the same issue with our cell service providers who were doing the same thing.
In fact I do. Comcast’s surveillance policy privacy policy is 14 pages long, so I’ll just cull a few items of interest.
Information We Collect:
- various mundane stuff like billing/payment info - device IDs and network addresses of equipment [presumably IPs and MAC addresses, which can be associated with other WiFi networks you connect with] - voice commands - video and audio recordings * network traffic data - …video activity data, as well as internet or online information such as web addresses and other activity data…
The video activity data includes, for example, which channels, programs, and advertisements are viewed and for how long… [ so they are paying attention if you change channels when advertisements are playing, and which ones ] …and use of devices like remote controls and tablets…
Location Information (they collect by various means)
Information Provided by Third Parties - basic stuff like info from credit reporting agencies - landlord information - demographic information (gender, age, census records, etc.) * location data * interest data (sports, travel and other recreational activities, shopping preferences…) * purchase data (public records, loyalty programs, etc.)
We may combine the data we collect from third parties with information in our business records, including information about your use of The Services. [and more about combining data]
Use of Information - provide and improve services [etc] - deliver relevant advertising - to create measurement and analytics reports - Sometimes we use information that personally identifies you [and sometimes not] - lots of mundane uses… - marketing and advertising
[ bunches of stuff about how they analyze what you watch to completion, how they determine which movies to recommend to individual customers, etc
To Create Analytics and Measurement Reports We and service providers who work on our behalf [etc, get this data] [use to determine advertisers’ effectiveness] We also use these reports to work with academic or research groups, and for other uses that help us develop and fund improvements in services and infrastructure [in other words, anything they want]
Sharing & Disclosures [this is a huge section, just culling a bit] Service Providers Comcast Family of Businesses they share everything here, of course, and this includes NBCUniversal-branded companies. …we may disclose your name and address to non-governmental entities, such as charities or businesses, so long as such disclosure does not reveal, directly or indirectly, the extent of your use of the Services or the nature of any transaction you make over our cable system. [this leaves a ton of wiggle room ; this is one of the few things that a customer can opt out of ]
Other Third Parties - callerID - E911 * We may publish and distribute, or cause to be published and distributed, telephone directories in print, on the internet and on disks. …include subscriber names, addresses, and telephone numbers, without restriction to their use. <— - …also to directory assistance services * Once our subscribers names, addresses, and telephone numbers appear in telephone directories or directory assistance, they may be sorted, packaged, repackaged, and made available again in different formats by anyone. [!!]
I’m tired of typing, but I’m sure you have the feel already. If you use Comcast, they’re using your viewing data and a whole lot more.
They may have free speech and a first amendment right over their own Data. But there are also privacy laws for all the people they are trying to sell that data on. We the people, if we want to protect our own privacy, we should be able to also. I have the right to keep my Data personal and not be sold to the highest bidder. Just because someone else has access to my Data, doesn't give them the right to just sell my Data. They are free to sell their own Data if they want, so long as it has nothing to do with ME, or any other customer that doesn't want their data sold. We are already getting screwed by these company's in high fee's and caps.
You're mixing up a lot of thoughts here.
"if we want to protect our own privacy, we should be able to"
Absolutely.
"I have the right to keep my Data personal and not be sold to the highest bidder"
Unfortunately, you're wrong. This would be great, but it's not true. Most of the rest of what you're saying is simply is not true, it's just what you (and I) WISH was true.
So the question is, what are you doing to stop this? It only stops when we stop using data-harvesting services.
So take away legal fiction “1st amendment protections” for corporations, if they pull these stunts! We The People are the masters, not faceless corporate.
Governments also should never sell our data without opt-in.
In your dreams. Face reality. Freedom is not free. To replace the revenue from selling our data the ISPs will simply raise their rates to compensate. I don't think I want the government to take over and operate ISPs or any other enterprise.
So how much is your data worth, $5 per month, per day? You value your personal data so little that you give it away for pennies and your fear of ANY government regulation to stop these data thieves is unlimited. So naive to think an ISP cares about you other than to exploit anything and everything they can cull about you and improve their bottom line.
This is absolutely true. That said, are you doing anything about it personally?
If you use data-harvesting services, of which there are so many, then you're normalizing this behavior. GG will chime in and say that even if you're not using data-harvesting services, like his favorite google, that you're still being harvested, and that's true, but you have little control over that, and the rollback has to start with companies and services where you DO have some control. Stop using stuff like gmail, use something like ProtonMail or Tutanota. Stop using stuff like google search, instead use DuckDuckGo or Startpage as much as possible. Stop using facebook completely (as in full-delete). Stop giving your phone number and other identity-tracking info to grocery stores and other retailers. There are lots of things we can do without a great deal of pain.
So take away legal fiction “1st amendment protections” for corporations, if they pull these stunts! We The People are the masters, not faceless corporate.
Governments also should never sell our data without opt-in.
In your dreams. Face reality. Freedom is not free. To replace the revenue from selling our data the ISPs will simply raise their rates to compensate. I don't think I want the government to take over and operate ISPs or any other enterprise.
So how much is your data worth, $5 per month, per day? You value your personal data so little that you give it away for pennies and your fear of ANY government regulation to stop these data thieves is unlimited. So naive to think an ISP cares about you other than to exploit anything and everything they can cull about you and improve their bottom line.
This is absolutely true. That said, are you doing anything about it personally?
If you use data-harvesting services, of which there are so many, then you're normalizing this behavior. GG will chime in and say that even if you're not using data-harvesting services, like his favorite google, that you're still being harvested, and that's true, but you have little control over that, and the rollback has to start with companies and services where you DO have some control. Stop using stuff like gmail...
Blah, surely you recognize the difference between relatively anonymized Advertising ID numbers used for pigeonholing related baskets of users as performed by Google and to a lesser extent Apple, and the outright collection and sale of personally identifiable and individualized data for purposes completely unrelated to otherwise benign ads as done by Experion, Comcast, TransUnion, Verizon, Spectrum,etc. You honestly consider the two to be equal threats to your privacy?
BTW as a side note since you mentioned it, where is the inherent danger in Apple Mail/GMail and similar mail apps that don't monetize content for personal profiling or sharing with 3rd parties? Companies like Earthlink harvest user email data but does GMail? By law both Apple and Google must monitor for something like child porn, and they do machine-read for malware but is there some specific privacy danger we should also be aware of? Understood that something like ProtonMail is a higher level of encryption, but for the common user should we all be avoiding the email services provided by Apple, Google, and Microsoft?
So take away legal fiction “1st amendment protections” for corporations, if they pull these stunts! We The People are the masters, not faceless corporate.
Governments also should never sell our data without opt-in.
In your dreams. Face reality. Freedom is not free. To replace the revenue from selling our data the ISPs will simply raise their rates to compensate. I don't think I want the government to take over and operate ISPs or any other enterprise.
I just don't understand the U.S.A. It's so backward for a country to have so little regulation and protection of its' citizens. I mean "people" have been replaced with "consumers" and the only ones afforded any protections are rich fat cats and corporations. I get 120MB/s fibre optic and I pay the equivalent of $16 USD. And my data is not sold to anybody, so the argument that your businesses must either charge you exorbitant fees or violate your rights as an individual to turn a profit is horse shit. I wouldn't live there even if It were the last refuge on earth. And 95% of the population have been so brainwashed by propaganda they just accept all the things that go on, and even fervently support a lot of the backward policies. I truly feel sorry for you guys.
So, these ISPs - that take legal action against competing services in areas where they are functionally a monopoly - are suddenly under such serious threat that they _need_ the right to sell the data they collect about you to the highest bidder?
The argument they're making seems legally dubious to me. For one thing, the ISPs and "companies like Apple and Google" are not in the same business: the ISPs are providing physical access to the service, the other companies are providing services on top of this physical access. So if you want to claim differential treatment, you need to provide ONLY the same kind of services - as soon as your offering differs, you will ipso facto be treated differently. Further, by definition the provision of physical access grants you knowledge of a person's location, which is private information. Given the history of the sale of this information by ISPs and other telecommunications providers, the legal attitude should be denial of the business activity.
If there was a functioning market in the ISP space, I'd have some sympathy for these companies. But they have fought tooth and nail to restrict trade and deny consumers any benefits that would accrue from competition. Any claim they make should be examined with a very skeptical eye and any judgement should be considering facts from all previous cases involving these miscreants.
So take away legal fiction “1st amendment protections” for corporations, if they pull these stunts! We The People are the masters, not faceless corporate.
Governments also should never sell our data without opt-in.
In your dreams. Face reality. Freedom is not free. To replace the revenue from selling our data the ISPs will simply raise their rates to compensate. I don't think I want the government to take over and operate ISPs or any other enterprise.
So how much is your data worth, $5 per month, per day? You value your personal data so little that you give it away for pennies and your fear of ANY government regulation to stop these data thieves is unlimited. So naive to think an ISP cares about you other than to exploit anything and everything they can cull about you and improve their bottom line.
This is absolutely true. That said, are you doing anything about it personally?
If you use data-harvesting services, of which there are so many, then you're normalizing this behavior. GG will chime in and say that even if you're not using data-harvesting services, like his favorite google, that you're still being harvested, and that's true, but you have little control over that, and the rollback has to start with companies and services where you DO have some control. Stop using stuff like gmail...
Blah, surely you recognize the difference between relatively anonymized Advertising ID numbers used for pigeonholing related baskets of users as performed by Google and to a lesser extent Apple, and the outright collection and sale of personally identifiable and individualized data for purposes completely unrelated to otherwise benign ads as done by Experion, Comcast, TransUnion, Verizon, Spectrum,etc. You honestly consider the two to be equal threats to your privacy?
You're losing your edge. It's like you saw my post, but didn't actually read it before responding, you're on autopilot. I don't want to bother responding if you're not going to actually read what I write. Try reading it again.
BTW as a side note since you mentioned it, where is the inherent danger in Apple Mail/GMail and similar mail apps that don't monetize content for personal profiling or sharing with 3rd parties? Companies like Earthlink harvest user email data but does GMail? By law both Apple and Google must monitor for something like child porn, and they do machine-read for malware but is there some specific privacy danger we should also be aware of? Understood that something like ProtonMail is a higher level of encryption, but for the common user should we all be avoiding the email services provided by Apple, Google, and Microsoft?
Yes. Everyone should do whatever they can to claw back whatever privacy they can. Especially relatively easy stuff like email.
ProtonMail isn't a "higher level of encryption", it's a higher level of privacy. Google does a great job of encrypting, as do most of the big players. They also excel in extracting actionable data from every aspect of using their services, whether it comes from the actual text of your communications or just meta data, which is abundantly actionable. But you already knew that.
I'm a little surprised this is the only thing you commented back on, especially after you explicitly asked for ISP TOS/PP info, and I actually bothered to type up a bunch of it. Maybe because it didn't include the keyword "google"?
Comments
The court found corporations can spend to influence elections, because restricting their spending is restricting their speech. Thus in this context they ruled money is speech, and granted them the ability to spend far more than an ordinary citizen can.
Pretending corporations are people when it is advantageous to do so, but giving it non-person privileges when it is not, is a problem.
Agree, but it is a two edged sword. Big corporations lobby for and then enjoy regulatory protection against new entrants. Become even bigger pricks, and lawyer politicians enjoy additional regulation against new entrants. Virtuous circle. Fir them. The problem with regulation is it can be too easily abused and subject to lobbying, earmarking legislation, etc etc.
that said, regulation for this would be decent regulation as long as it was kept simple and straightforward, and focussed on one of the original purposes of government, the protection of property. Your data. Your property.
This is very much a road we as a society should want to go down.
As for the corporation part, yes, corporations - i.e., people acting through or on behalf of corporations, or people associating in corporate form - have the right to speak and thus have the right to spend money to speak. They don't, however, have the right to contribute money to political candidates or parties.
We don't often, for legal purposes, consider corporations to be people because we actually think corporations are humans. We do it because the actions of corporations represent the actions of people. A corporation can be thought of as either of two things: (1) an association of people or (2) something which people use. Corporations don't exist naturally and don't act other than at the direction of humans; they don't act of their own volition. We wouldn't say that the local biker club doesn't have the constitutional right to speak because it isn't a person but rather an association of people. Also, we wouldn't say that a billboard doesn't have the right to say something because it isn't a person. It, of course, isn't a person. But it's used by people to say something and they have rights - to include the right to use a billboard to say something.
Fundamentally it's the rights of people that are at issue when we consider the rights of corporations. We don't lose our constitutional rights just because we associate with others in various forms. We have long recognized that corporations, in effect, have constitutional rights. It was fairly recently that the Supreme Court changed tack and denied the political speech rights of corporations. Citizens United put us back where we'd historically been when it comes to the rights of corporations.
As for the legal privileges we give corporations, that's a legitimate issue of consideration. But governments often, in different contexts, give different entities and people privileges. That's not a valid reason to deny those entities or people basic constitutional rights. We give those privileges because we supposedly think it's beneficial to society to do so, that's also why we give the people who own corporations limited liability. If we want to not give such privileges, fine. But we don't get to say you lose your constitutional rights because you're given something by the government.
The ramifications of a change whereby we legally considered people to lose their constitutional rights when they acted in connection with corporations would be huge. They'd be unthinkable. Do we really not want MSNBC or Fox News or Huffington Post to have a constitutional right to criticize politicians or advocate political policies? An incorporated publisher shouldn't have the constitutional right to print bibles?
Let’s just keep letting corporations rule the country, folks, everything will turn out just fiiiine... :puke:
In fact I do. Comcast’s surveillance policy privacy policy is 14 pages long, so I’ll just cull a few items of interest.
Information We Collect:
- various mundane stuff like billing/payment info
- device IDs and network addresses of equipment
[presumably IPs and MAC addresses, which can be associated with other WiFi networks you connect with]
- voice commands
- video and audio recordings
* network traffic data
- …video activity data, as well as internet or online information such as web addresses and other activity data…
The video activity data includes, for example, which channels, programs, and advertisements are viewed and for how long…
[ so they are paying attention if you change channels when advertisements are playing, and which ones ]
…and use of devices like remote controls and tablets…
Location Information
(they collect by various means)
Information Provided by Third Parties
- basic stuff like info from credit reporting agencies
- landlord information
- demographic information (gender, age, census records, etc.)
* location data
* interest data (sports, travel and other recreational activities, shopping preferences…)
* purchase data (public records, loyalty programs, etc.)
We may combine the data we collect from third parties with information in our business records, including information about your use of The Services. [and more about combining data]
Use of Information
- provide and improve services [etc]
- deliver relevant advertising
- to create measurement and analytics reports
- Sometimes we use information that personally identifies you [and sometimes not]
- lots of mundane uses…
- marketing and advertising
[ bunches of stuff about how they analyze what you watch to completion, how they determine which movies to recommend to individual customers, etc
To Create Analytics and Measurement Reports
We and service providers who work on our behalf [etc, get this data]
[use to determine advertisers’ effectiveness]
We also use these reports to work with academic or research groups, and for other uses that help us develop and fund improvements in services and infrastructure [in other words, anything they want]
Sharing & Disclosures [this is a huge section, just culling a bit]
Service Providers
Comcast Family of Businesses
they share everything here, of course, and this includes NBCUniversal-branded companies.
…we may disclose your name and address to non-governmental entities, such as charities or businesses, so long as such disclosure does not reveal, directly or indirectly, the extent of your use of the Services or the nature of any transaction you make over our cable system. [this leaves a ton of wiggle room ; this is one of the few things that a customer can opt out of ]
Other Third Parties
- callerID
- E911
* We may publish and distribute, or cause to be published and distributed, telephone directories in print, on the internet and on disks. …include subscriber names, addresses, and telephone numbers, without restriction to their use. <—
- …also to directory assistance services
* Once our subscribers names, addresses, and telephone numbers appear in telephone directories or directory assistance, they may be sorted, packaged, repackaged, and made available again in different formats by anyone. [!!]
I’m tired of typing, but I’m sure you have the feel already. If you use Comcast, they’re using your viewing data and a whole lot more.
BTW as a side note since you mentioned it, where is the inherent danger in Apple Mail/GMail and similar mail apps that don't monetize content for personal profiling or sharing with 3rd parties? Companies like Earthlink harvest user email data but does GMail? By law both Apple and Google must monitor for something like child porn, and they do machine-read for malware but is there some specific privacy danger we should also be aware of? Understood that something like ProtonMail is a higher level of encryption, but for the common user should we all be avoiding the email services provided by Apple, Google, and Microsoft?
The argument they're making seems legally dubious to me. For one thing, the ISPs and "companies like Apple and Google" are not in the same business: the ISPs are providing physical access to the service, the other companies are providing services on top of this physical access. So if you want to claim differential treatment, you need to provide ONLY the same kind of services - as soon as your offering differs, you will ipso facto be treated differently. Further, by definition the provision of physical access grants you knowledge of a person's location, which is private information. Given the history of the sale of this information by ISPs and other telecommunications providers, the legal attitude should be denial of the business activity.
If there was a functioning market in the ISP space, I'd have some sympathy for these companies. But they have fought tooth and nail to restrict trade and deny consumers any benefits that would accrue from competition. Any claim they make should be examined with a very skeptical eye and any judgement should be considering facts from all previous cases involving these miscreants.