About 1 – 2 new members a day keeps attempting to join this list from two different known forum spam harboring email addresses. I found out about them here. I’ve stopped registration until they go away. If you want to join, just contact me and we’ll see what we can do. Thanks.
Apparently more privacy groups are interested in stopping Charter and other ISP’s from selling private information – no matter how sanitized – to third-party NebuAD.
Mention of the same is found on dslreports.com and techspot.com.
According to Yahoo news aggregator, “Among the groups signing the letter were the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), the Center for Digital Democracy, the Consumer Federation of America, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and Public Knowledge.” Read the letter here. (PDF)
Update: Read CDT’s press release here.
Protecting the privacy of Cable subscribers was originally legislated in 1984 with the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984. Cable companies had begun selling information about subscribers to other parties without full disclosure to subscribers. This act put a stop to that by starting a policy called ‘opt-in’. Prior notification to subscribers about what data is being recorded and sent must be communicated to subscribers. Prior written or electronic consent has to be given by subscribers before the data may be sold or otherwise distributed. All data thereafter must be destroyed.
Opt-out solutions put the onus on the subscriber rather than the cable company to investigate the situation. Now, explanations are buried in fine print of subscriber agreements. In effect the cable company makes the policy without true prior understanding and permission from the subscribers.
Now cable companies and other ISP’s want to record and sell private information about subscribers to third parties who will likely sell your data for whatever money they can get to whomever can pay. Subscribers won’t even have to be notified of the transactions.
Do you own a functioning website? From your browser, go to ‘http://nonexistent.yoursite.com’ where ‘nonexistent’ is any nonsense word you haven’t made into a subdomain and ‘yoursite.com’ is the site you own. If you see a fake search page with your ISP’s name on it rather than a simple gray ‘404 – file not found’ page, your ISP is probably redirecting your subdomain for profit. It may not seem like a big thing, but that money adds up. ISP’s are supposed to be serving exactly what is out there on the web. If it’s there, I want to see it exactly as it is – not manipulated by my ISP.