So the House voted yesterday, 215 to 205, to kill the FCC's broadband privacy rules. If you missed it (and honestly, half the internet was busy arguing about the Nintendo Switch's screen scratches or whatever), the short version is: Congress used something called the Congressional Review Act to undo a rule that would've made ISPs get your permission before selling your browsing history to advertisers. The Senate already did their version last week, 50 to 48. It just needs Trump's signature now, which is basically a formality at this point.
I've read maybe six different explainers on this in the last 24 hours and I'm still annoyed, so let's talk about it here instead of doomscrolling Twitter about it.
Here's the thing that gets me. I don't have a choice of ISP. I have Comcast. That's it. That's the whole list. If Comcast decides my browsing habits are worth packaging up and selling to whoever wants to buy ad-targeting data, I can't just switch to the scrappy local competitor, because there isn't one. This is true for something like half the country, and it's a big part of why this whole fight matters more than "just use Chrome incognito lol" — your ISP sees everything regardless of which browser tab is doing the asking. Incognito mode hides your history from the person using your computer after you. It does nothing against the company routing your packets.
So last night I did the thing I've been putting off for probably two years now and actually paid for a VPN. Went with Private Internet Access mostly because a couple of people whose opinions I trust use it and it's cheap, something like seven bucks a month if you pay monthly, way less if you commit to a year. Set it up on my laptop in about four minutes. The Android app was a little clunkier, took some fiddling with the settings to get it to actually auto-connect on boot, but it works now.
Does this fix everything? No. Not remotely. A VPN just moves the "who can see my traffic" problem from Comcast to whatever VPN company I picked, and now I'm trusting their no-logs policy the same way I was supposedly trusting my ISP's terms of service before (which, let's be honest, nobody reads). It's also going to shave a little off my download speeds, and streaming Netflix through a VPN has historically been a pain because Netflix actively blocks a lot of VPN IP ranges. So we'll see how that goes tonight when I try to watch anything.
But it's still better than nothing, and it was a five-minute fix for a problem that isn't going away on its own. If you're in a one-ISP household like mine, I'd genuinely recommend doing the same thing this weekend instead of waiting for the news cycle to move on, because it will move on, probably by Friday, and then everyone forgets this happened until the next privacy story blows up.
One thing I keep coming back to: this whole debate got framed as "ISPs vs. Google and Facebook, who already do this anyway, so why does it matter." And sure, that's technically true, Google's business model is built on knowing everything about you too. But you can at least choose not to use Google for stuff (I mean, good luck, but you can theoretically use DuckDuckGo, ditch Gmail, whatever). You can't choose not to use your ISP. The internet doesn't work without one, and in a lot of places you don't get to pick which one. That asymmetry is the whole ballgame here and it kept getting flattened into "well, everyone's already spying on you" takes that missed the point entirely.
Anyway. My browser has a VPN icon in the menu bar now, my Netflix might get mad at me tonight, and I've apparently become the kind of person who has opinions about the Congressional Review Act. 2017 is going great so far.
Also, completely unrelated, but I've had a Duke-Kansas replay playing in the background while writing this and I still don't understand zone defense. Anyway.