The White House gave a cold shoulder Monday to concerns about the future of Internet privacy.
President Trump signed into law a resolution that repealed protections requiring Internet service providers to get your permission before collecting and sharing data. These protections — which had not yet gone into effect — were approved by the Federal Communications Commission in the final days of the Obama administration.
The providers have data on your web browsing history, app usage and geo-location.
Providers would also have been required to notify customers about the types of information collected and shared.
Trump’s move doesn’t come as a surprise: the White House said last week that repealing the protections will create an “equal playing field” between Internet service providers and tech companies
Opponents of the privacy rules argued they would place an undue burden on broadband providers while leaving large Internet companies like Facebook and Google free to collect user data without asking permission.
“President Trump and Congress have appropriately invalidated one part of the Obama-era plan for regulating the Internet,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who was appointed by Trump, said in a statement. “Those flawed privacy rules, which never went into effect, were designed to benefit one group of favored companies, not online consumers.”
But rather than apply similar protections to more businesses, the resolution passed by Republican-controlled Congress scraps the rules entirely.
Democrats and privacy advocates have argued this approach effectively hands over the customer’s personal information to the highest bidder.
