Telco lobbyists accidentally send their talking points
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
If he'd just included a link to the documents, I'd have been interested in his interpretation. But after making a point of how long the 12-page document was, and then getting only a few quotes, I'm wondering what he's "editorializing" out of them.
He doesn't literally say it, but I think the implication is that the information is in some way sensitive or private. I suppose he could have written that sentence and it would be technically true if the "info" was like, the weather that day, but I doubt that's what he meant.
"Well, it could happen, you see, if the President of the United States were to use the power of his office to help us mold public opinion and help us get that legislation." --Arlington Hughes
I'm not arguing that ISPs aren't a privacy risk or that they shouldn't be fought. I'm pointing out that Masnick damages his own credibility by making stupid claims that, in order to be believed, would require either a technically unskilled reader or one who is willing to pretend the modern web/internet works differently than it does.
Masnick attempts to frame this debate in a way where everyone who doesn't join him in ignoring/defending the privacy violations of Silicon Valley tech companies is "on the other side". It's a dishonest and shitty way to frame things, and doesn't reflect reality in any way.
ISPs have plenty of black marks against them. Lying in order to pretend ISPs are the only ones we should be fighting isn't helping anything.
I don't say they do, but my trust in Google not to do this isn't that much higher than ISP s not doing this.
(Though, to be fair, code doing this would probably be found rather quickly in the Chromium code. So they'd have to add it to the Chrome binary directly.)
Anyone wanting to truly understand what chrome is doing should run an ssl decrypting proxy on their web traffic for awhile- it is eye opening.
Firefox on the other hand, you have to import the whole CA chain into the app itself for it to work transparently, since it won't reference the OS cert store.
But if your browser has ever logged into something like Facebook or Google, then any site with embedded content will be sending info about your behavior back to them. A LOT of sites carry pixels from those companies, but anything can do it: an embedded tweet, a YouTube player, a "like" button, etc. This is on top of the info they collect from your direct interactions with them.
With a notice informing you if you refuse you won't get the malware blocking and scanning services to protect you. Depending on the laws the ISP may require you to accept the certificate in order to pass TLS traffic.
1. https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Google-Analytics
2. https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2018/06/13/june-2018-web-...
The fact that "Uncle Joe's Fishing Blog" with a total of 5 hits that weren't crawlers or Uncle Joe doesn't include GA, doesn't really mean much in the context of this discussion. The vast majority of traffic on the web goes to a very small portion of those 1.5B sites.