What the US Senate Vote Barring the FCC from Protecting the Privacy of Customers Means

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Todd Weaver

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On March 23rd, 2017 the US Congress disapproved the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to “Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services”, and so that rule shall have no force or effect.

This means the FCC does not have the legal authority to protect the privacy of customers from ISPs gobbling up all the data they want to. The ISPs own the connection from your router to the Internet at large. ISPs have access to everything that passes over the connection including any non-encrypted content such as, every webpage you visit, every email you send, every photo you share, every document you deliver, and any social media post you make. Utilizing SSL helps guard against this threat of ISPs selling your head-end usage data, which is why Purism integrates EFF‘s HTTPS Everywhere in PureOS by default. In the future Purism will also be including SSL tunneling by default to help users stop ISPs from the privacy invading fire-hose of everything you do online.