Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) has won the legal right to monitor your browsing history and sell these data for profit — without your knowledge or permission.
It means your online transactions, your email, your social contacts and conversations … all your secrets … can be sold to any bidder. Your life in Cyberspace is now an open book. Goodbye, privacy. Hello, blackmail.
In conservative circles, the new Internet bill will level the playing field and humble the thousand pound guerrilla known as Google. Despite this claim, the new bill signed into law puts another Big Brother in your living room. Conservative double speak masks a hidden agenda.
Your ISP will no longer be called a service provider but an ‘edge provider.’ This neologism means ‘sleuth by proxy’ in any language; and your secret police dossier will be known as ‘consumer research’ — a weasel word of dystopian proportions.
Do Internet search engines monitor your browsing history? This claim is deliberately misleading. Google tracks your search history to more accurately predict your next search. Notice the flaw in reasoning: A search history is not the same as your browsing history.
Google may help you find a bicycle retailer, but it does not sell bicycles. As a free online service underwritten by advertising, Google is in essence a media company analogous to commercial television. Thus, there is no inherent conflict in Google’s business model or market practices.
Nor is Google the only competitor in Cyberspace. Others include Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, AOL, and Ask, as examples. Google enjoys a differential competitive advantage because its ‘natural language’ search engine is popular and easy to use.
Why are conservatives so scornful of Google? Their reasoning is petty: An estimated 250 employees rotated between Google and government jobs during the Obama administration. Therefore, everything ‘Obama’ must be purged — erased from government and the pages of history.
No doubt, reckless partisanship turns every public issue into raging controversy. The next winners and losers will no longer be chosen on the basis of innovation and merit but by party affiliation. This law alters the dynamics of a free and open marketplace.
Meanwhile, what’s missing? You, the American consumer! This law invites proxy sleuths into your home through a trapdoor — a form of surveillance without the obligatory search warrant. Are you angry yet? In the words of Wednesday Addams, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
(c) 2017 Jeffrey Berger
1 comment:
You don't have to use Google. You do have other choices, inconvenient as they well may be. Most of us have few, if any choices, when it comes to internet service providers. What will probably happen is that internet service providers will eventually provide privacy in regard to one's browsing history for an additional fee. "Greed is good. Greed is the American way"
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