After vote to kill privacy rules, users try to “pollute” their Web history | Hacker News Reader

After vote to kill privacy rules, users try to “pollute” their Web history

arstechnica.com

63 pointsErrorcod315 comments

arstechnica is one of the few sites that is accurately stating that these privacy exposures exist now and stem from during the Obama administration (in 2015). It's implied in the wording of this article, but their linked article from 24 March spells it out better:

"So what has changed for Internet users? In one sense, nothing changed this week, because the requirement to obtain customer consent before sharing or selling data is not scheduled to take effect until at least December 4, 2017. ISPs didn’t have to follow the rules yesterday or the day before, and they won’t ever have to follow them if the rules are eliminated."

Instead of just implementing the late-term Obama rule that was to take effect in December or later, we should be pushing for a more broad replacement rule that also encompasses major content providers such as Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and Google/Youtube.

We should be pushing for legislation, on all levels of government. Not regulation at purely the federal level.

These Dem legislators ho so opposed the changes should push for a law in their own state which affords their citizens the same protections.

Like in MN! Yay, go my home state.

In Alaska, the right to privacy is enshrined in the State Constitution...

§ 22. Right of Privacy - The right of the people to privacy is recognized and shall not be infringed.

I think only Alaska and Hawaii have such state constitutional rights explicitly listed.

I think privacy is that case only applies to the government's actions, not the actions of private actors like ISPs.

Yes. The ISP-consumer relationship falls under contract law (civil).

The only beneficial thing that trump has done is to make things that seemed fine while under a "nice" administration show how bad they can be if under a "nasty" administration.

I've heard a Trump presidency described as a "productive apocalypse" which honestly I wish we could have avoided entirely but maybe just maybe we'll get some progress out of it in certain areas in the end.

Sometimes I think there's a day of reckoning coming for many, when tomorrow's search engines start surfacing what's already on the public internet, about 10x as efficiently as they already do.

Does it make sense too pollute the web history against ISP as lot of pages become available via HTTPS-only transport nowadays? DNS pollution (script) would be enough IMHO as ISPs capture queries in clear text. Mosty they provide their own DNS servers too. Domain names plus timestamps tell a lot about ones online habits. Of course the better option is to use DNSCrypt, VPN or some DNS tunelling via secure link.

Until DNS requests are encrypted the domain you are accessing is still visible.

Tunnel DNS over a VPN from your router. This would also avoid Comcast's paid "suggestions" for typo' domain names.

If you're not running a VPN and just want to purge those 'suggestions' then you can run a local dnsmasq server and use the `bogus-nxdomain` option.

One benefit of widespread adoption even if filtering countermeasures exist is that pollution treatments will cost money to operate, likely undermining whatever profit they might be making from this.

I was thinking about having a service to mix a group of users' exposed information so that other parties could not figure out what a user did. Just like groups of animals do. Very similar to VPN in some way. Anything like this out there for us?

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