Good to see Maine has a law protecting privacy. I agree with other commenters that this kind of law should be broad-spectrum, affecting all businesses from telcos to lemonade stands.
My ISP is a municipal fiber provider with strong and proud Net Neutrality. Obviously NN isn't a privacy issue, but it's unlikely to pair with trying to sell personal data (of our own neighbors!) for cash.
In addition to consumer protection laws, strongly consider supporting local municipal FTTH. Compared to Comcast, I pay less money for unmetered symmetric gigabit, it's run by ordinary people (not comic book villains), and the money stays here in town. All it takes is determined civic engagement.
(And that includes voting out the people who support these attacks against people.)
Meanwhile, collect signatures for a small, non-threatening initiative like whether the city should explore the possibility of creating FTTH. Be involved in that process. Be helpful, positive, and patient. Contact other cities that have done this and get advice from them. Get the study/plan published. If the city govt is against it, vote them out and continue. Otherwise, encourage local govt to promote the plan. Then have a ballot question on whether to build the municipal fiber ISP.
Reasons to build a municipal fiber ISP:
* lower cost Internet and money stays here
* superior service
* net neutrality and consumer protection
* jobs, jobs, jobs
* increased property values[0] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...
For Comcast: https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/ccpa
It's a little tedious since you have to do it with each company, but so far I've found that it largely works.
You can also do it for equifax, experian, and transunion (though when I tried equifax it was unsurprisingly broken).
You can either request the data they have on you, ask for it to be deleted (the parts they don't require for operation), or opt-out of resale.
This website [0] has a bunch of links to the CCPA pages for different companies. The better companies have enabled this ability for all users, but generally the companies you'd rather delete from have only enabled it for California.
what, precisely, are the implications of this?
They remove any other data about you that they collect and would otherwise 'anonymize' and sell. You can ask them to give you the data first before asking them to delete it if you're interested in what it specifically is.
That's what they'll argue anyway. They'll use different words, but whatever words they use will carry that message.
Just one mouthed, audible word to confirm the entity can qualify for speech. Then we can consider "free speech" for that entity.
I can only dream this would hold up even as I know there are likely dozens of loopholes to render it irrelevant. Not to mention specific exceptions and allowances already in law.
Demand is far too overstating it. And I'm not proposing or demanding it become law. There's a bunch of side-effects we might not like.
But let's go with it anyway:
Freedom of speech is different from freedom of the press. But both are linked because the amendment was written to allow for people to record their grievances to government via a free press. This is why free press was linked - people wanted their speech recorded in print and it was seen that government might legislate this out of existence or otherwise restrict it.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Notice that people can obviously operate a press without congress outlawing it.
Care to show me where a corporation gets free speech from? Not from that amendment. It comes from law around granting corporations the status of "legal person". This was necessary to allow a group of people to operate a business and have the business be liable, make contracts etc instead of the group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
If you want to imply corporations have freedom of the press and therefore freedom of speech thats the only angle you have if you reject "legal person". Freedom of press is the ability to print. My fictional judge would accept that printed page as "from the corporate entity". But its still not speech: That judge would then ask the corporate entity to speak it.
As for a corporation actually being able to speak or print. The entity can own a printer. So it can "speak" via the press. But it can't actually talk without a proxy. No actual mouth nor was it born with one nor would it could presumably be seen to even possibly have been born with one. This covers the case where some clever lawyer might bring up exceptions for birth deformity as a reason for granting something without speech actual free speech.
But in reality its all moot: "legal person" is already a thing. And it overrides all of this. Until it doesn't I guess but that is unlikely.
The more astute would just say that any of these conditions would have to be put into law and the amendment prevents that. So, its still moot. Unless you determine that legal entities aren't actually people but only narrowly defined as people for particular reasons.
Your piano, for example, can't employ me.
I agree. The law should apply to everyone, not just ISPs.
Free speech states that a state isn't going to prosecute you directly for whatever you may say. But that doesn't mean you are free from the consequences of what you're saying.
Privacy protection simply states that any legal person who feels that your actions violated the consent they gave, is free to sue you via the legal system for compensation for damages incurred. Which has little if anything to do with free speech.
If a telco uses the "free speech" argument, they essentially argue "we're a media company and we are accountable for what we publish".
If we're discussing media companies, it's interesting to note that these pull the "freedom of press" card to defend divulging person or confidential information in news outlets.
At this point, the entire discussion becomes rather silly semantics.
Interestingly, many EU countries also have "secrecy of correspondence" enshrined as a fundamental principle into their constitutions. The U.S. does not:
If you are punished by the government for what you say, are you not being prosecuted by the government for what you say? If we say that all one needs to do to be punished for saying the wrong thing is to enter into an agreement with another person, what is to stop Facebook from adding something to its EULA saying by using the services you are agreeing to not say anything out of line with what Facebook wishes?
It seems like the end result of this rationale is that we allow the government to enforce private agreements that compromise speech. Effectively meaning you can sign away your First Amendment rights.
The whole "doesn't mean you are free from the consequences of what you're saying" is meant in respect to how other people are treating you, not how the government is treating you (regardless if it is on behalf of another person).
The 1st begins with "Congress shall make no law.."
The 4th states "..shall not be violated"
This is important because the 1st restricts what the government can do, while the 4th restricts what anyone can do. In other words, Congress need not pass a law restricting the collecting and sale of private information because that activity is already banned by the 4th. This is a job for the courts.
No individual or company has to necessarily "respect" your first amendment right to free speech, as that is something that can only be violated by the government or a government affiliated entity for which these protections also apply.
A group of gun's rights advocates marching in Virginia recently argued that not being allowed to brandish assault weapons at the capitol was violation of their "symbolic" speech.[0]
I'm just waiting for the point where someone tries to make the defense in court that shooting another person in the head was an exercise of their freedom of speech.
[0]https://wtop.com/virginia/2020/01/gun-groups-want-firearms-b...
Do the big telco's remove the history of their own execs when selling it?
What would it cost for someone to buy the browsing histories of the execs at these companies ... or that of politicians and their staffs.
I hire those assholes to transport my bits, unmodified except for TTL, from my endpoint to a peer, no more, no less. Since they have a de facto monopoly I don’t even have the ability to choose an alternative. This exploitative crap must be stopped.
Of course my version is that they're all common carriers and have to comply with some norms, but allowing platforms to do this but not telcos is potentially silly
I could be wrong. I guess my point is, this is a double-edged sword, like most freedoms.
You never know, on a misunderstanding it might actually work!https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/isps-sue-maine-c...
California Constitution
ARTICLE I DECLARATION OF RIGHTS
SECTION 1.
All people are by nature free and independent
and have inalienable rights. Among these are
enjoying and defending life and liberty,
acquiring, possessing, and protecting property,
and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness,
and privacy.on edit: obviously not because I'm not in the U.S but if I were?
Clearly, the First Amendment right to free speech isn't absolute and unrestricted.
I'd heard they gathered a large amount of data, but more to do with the trend of just hoovering up every bit possible and store it in their data lakes.
My understanding at the time is they had no idea what to do with it.
Some of these initiatives could be rooted in little more than some manager wanting to stamp `mined data lake using machine learning and AI to generate $(x) in $(m)`. It doesn't have to actually mean anything.
That said, maybe they've discovered a route to more revenue, hence the push.
edit: Should clarify this was in Canada when the linked article is about the US.
I have to use crapcast (though goes down each night) as att, despite their ads, will only provision me 768kb DSL though I’m less than a mile from the CO/DSLAMS (and the PAIX for that matter)
I assume elsewhere the two companies have a deal where comcast is slow and att is faster. Of course the competition authorities and fcc are utterly supine.
Palo Alto used to run its own infrastructure but over the years stupid privatization has gradually shed phone, TV, garbage collection, parking enforcement and such for inferior, more expensive private services. I expect power and water to fall next.
I imagine if historically cable tv and phone were transmitted by the same technology or company, there would only be one company allowed access. Since these were historically separate, they are granted access to the poles. Technically this is not a monopoly given that there are two different providers. It is monopolistic in my view. I have yet to live in an area that has more than two companies with pole access.
24 million Americans don't have any options that the FCC considers as fixed broadband service (25/3mbps)
As a counter example that shows they are still not fully "people": a corporation cannot adopt a child or get married.
Corporate “personhood” goes back even further, to at least 1819 with the Dartmouth v Woodward decision.
Citizens United has been surrounded by ignorance, promoted by newspapers who, incidentally, had their effectiveness and power reduced since they were no longer the only “protected” gatekeepers for picking political candidates.
Why should the New York Times editorial board get to express their opinions through millions of printed papers distributed through an expensive and vast logistics network, or via a website maintained by hired employees with a budget of millions per year?
Why shouldn’t Bob’s Hardware Inc., be able to also spend money, in exactly the same way as the New York Times to spread the message of their preferred political candidates that would be helpful for their business? How is Bob’s Hardware any less entitled to being able to express their opinions or present their facts than the N.Y. Times? Should the EFF be able to spend money at the same levels as what the New York Times spends to cut down trees and print some words on it and then send those words to readers all over the world? Media organizations can spend limitless amounts on getting their message out — Bob’s Hardware ought to have the same rights.
The First Amendment doesn’t protect newspapers as a special class — it protects everyone. The “press” is referring to the actual machine used to print things, not specifically to a news gathering organization. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/02/dont-be...