At least FB is making changes to address the issues, unlike At&t who keeps screwing people over more and more every year.
Do you think most people have actually thought about how their ISPs must track their every interaction with the web and read all of their unencrypted chats and traffic?
I think that what's needed is more awareness about what the ISPs are doing, but I really don't like headlines and articles like this one that try to minimize what Facebook and Google are doing.
The ISPs tracking may be more all-encompassing, but a large portion of the web, especially popular websites are becoming "dark" to them, as major sites adopt HTTPS encryption. Their next most valuable tracking tool besides HTTP is probably the DNS server. And to get people to change that you'll need raise a lot of awareness about it.
I guess Microsoft, Google, and Apple enabling their own DNS resolvers by default on their operating system would be a small improvement, but you're kind of moving the problem instead of solving it. And Google already does that with recent versions of Android, I believe.
The author's LinkedIn includes recently working for a law firm, Fenwick & West, which proudly brags about Google being one of their clients on their career page.
If an article is doing "whataboutism" that minimizes the danger of big tech, check their resume, it's probably their job.
This said, Comcast (which owns NBC universal), has been able to use cable boxes to improve ad targeting for decades, trace that back to internet usage, and apply it to models already built for NBC usage. A
n even more powerful one though is Verizon, where with their now acquisition of yahoo can use that data as well, which is combined with both all of the home data collection comcast has, but with 80+ million mobile users as well.
Yes, but because it's your ISP and your data it's snooping, it suddenly becomes important.
As they say, one death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic.
It's not obvious to me that ISPs would bother (except where required to do so by law). They could just route traffic and not inspect anything.
The issue is mainly that ISPs are also, by and large, the Cable Companies. Cable is dying. It's dying quickly. Cable companies are seeing dwindling revenue streams from their cable packages and are going to be looking for ways to bolster their shareholder's profits despite the inevitable death of traditional cable programming schemes.
How do they do that?
They do it by selling anything and everything they can to advertisers, exactly like what they've been doing with cable. Coincidentally that's also exactly the reason that cable is dying.
TLS limits what your ISP can see. So until they block encrypted traffic it doesn't scare me too much.
1. I don't think people have thought about it enough. I know I haven't. I think part of the reason is AT&T et. al. seem "inevitable" whereas Facebook is conveniently "quittable".
2. FB's lack of privacy has been discussed in the open and in the news recently, making it stand out.
3. (One of) FB's goals is to sell you to advertisers...
Because we choose to use AT&T and other ISPs. Facebook has enough beacons spread across millions of websites that even if you choose not to have a Facebook account, it's still monitoring you.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/d7c955ac-3213-11e8-ac48-10c6fdc22...