You've documented exactly why we should buy Congressional data. Let's make it painfully obvious that the data can be "weaponized" against them, their loved ones, and business partners by the unscrupulous and the unstable.
edit: link to donate to the gofundme campaign to purchase the browser histories https://www.gofundme.com/searchinternethistory
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170329/13234837037/no-yo...
You might also include a message along the lines of "everyone knows this information about you, it's just that we're the only one telling you that we know".
Put the money toward campaign contributions to outbid the competition. Apparently they are relatively cheap and you only need a majority consisting of the cheapest ones.
Here is the apparent price list for the congress people involved: http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15100620/congress-fcc-isp-...
Politicians do not care about such nonsense, because they don't have to deal with it, because they have power. What politicians care about is their credibility, and if the public can't see what's going on then it has no impact on their credibility.
You seem to think that what we need to do is help politicians understand the significance of what they're doing, and that once they see it our way they'll do The Right Thing. But this is to assume that the politicians and the constituencies that elected them share your basic values about fairness, privacy, and so on. In many cases, they don't.
That's the real issue here IMO. It blows my mind that Comcast et al thinks it's unfair that Google, Facebook, etc get to profit off of user data while they can not. I get that most politicians don't have the slightest understanding of tech, but how hard is it to understand that Google, Facebook et al get this access because they provide a service for nearly free with the cost being your personal information.
Comcast, Verizon, etc. sells a service that consumers purchase. Now they are increasing the costs by profiting off of our personal data while giving users nothing in return. Ironically, this gives them an unfair advantage. These corporate welfare queens don't have to compete by providing a service that I would pay for with my personal information.
The ISP you mentioned, Sonic.net, is only available in a few select locations.
1. ISP monitor all your internet traffic. Google can only have access to what google services you opt in to use.
2. At this time we don't know how the ISP's will sell your internet history whether it be individual or in aggregate, but google doesn't sell your information.
3. I trust google's security more than ISPs
This is, IMHO, one of the biggest unresolved ethical issues with data protection and privacy today. On the one hand, it would be a great burden on society to stop everyone from using any third party services for anything involving personal data about someone else. On the other hand, when those services are no longer neutral and will process any data they receive for other purposes without the informed consent of some of the data subjects, that's a dubious practice at best. Another example is a social network's mobile app uploading your phone's entire contacts list, and just like that they've probably got a unique personal ID and a great deal of networking information about everyone on that list.
Now we live in big groups, which provide pseudo-nymity.
One of the things I keep coming back to in my head is a way to democratize the information collected about us. Right now, certain "people" (including companies and government organizations) have lots of access to lots of data and the rest of the population has very little access to that information.
Does privacy matter as much if we share observations as humans likely did in the past?
We know what the statsi archives did... now there's unprecedented power to repeat that mistake at a larger scale.
- information asymmetry: to make things democratic & symmetric, you would have to open up information about those in enforcement. Historically there is a strong resistance to that (though transparency would be welcomed). Even if it were to work at a domestic level, the defense sector still primarily relies on security through obscurity. "National interest" then becomes a convenient way to hide things.
- processing asymmetry: those who have the compute and skill to better access and correlate information will have a big advantage. Compare your ability to (hypothetically) download what you want about anyone, with an organization that houses all the data themselves and deployed Splunk/Watson/Palantir/whatever to massage that data exactly how they want.
In a small community, people know each other. They also know who's spreading a given rumor. People tend to have great instincts, so if the person spreading the rumor is notoriously unreliable, they'll already have acquired that reputation, and the rumor won't have sway. And people can spread rumors, but rumors can spread about them, too, so they behave. None of that is true in cybermundo. Journalists spread lies about you? Millions who'd never even heard of you before now believe them, and your life is ruined.
You can't have high-trust societies on a high scale.
I mean there are so many lies, so many things people do only in secret, like porn or drugs. By numbers both are a fundamental part of society, but only some can openly admit watching/doing it.
Then all the normal lies, like what you really think about person xyz, or your boss, etc
Or the persons you are attracted to besides your monogamic partner ...
Or all the unsolved thieves, murders or dirty secrets of the governments .. Would probably make a big kaboom if all released at once.
.. Or a rethinking about how it might be nicer to not live with all those lies, but being able to live the way we are and feel and not hiding hit so much with fake politenes etc.
Probably not; reasonable doubts would emerge and in the end people pick what they want to thing and ignore quickly the rest of facts, as Wikileaks releases or climate change shown us. If everybody is caught seeing porn, people will just shrug, say something like 'mind your own bussiness' to other, and in the end nobody will care about porn. Maybe is just a question of time that this happens; so... better evil than stupid.
There is no law that explicitly states that selling individualized internet search history is illegal. However, (and you would know this if you read the techdirt article) internet advertising marketplaces don't function that way. It's not that it's illegal, its just inefficient. The advertisers don't need to know WHO you are to know that their ad is relevant to you.