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Senate Votes to Remove Privacy Rules Placed Under Obama Administration

On Thursday, Senate voted to prevent regulations designed to protect the privacy of Internet users from being enacted. These regulations, introduced during the Obama administration, would have required Internet Service Providers, such as Comcast and Optimum Online, to acquire consent from the individuals they provide internet access to before selling or using much of the personal information about them that they collect.

The consequences of this vote are not immediate and will depend upon action taken by the House of Representatives and by the President. The regulations in question are not currently in effect and were not scheduled to be put into place until December of this year. And before the bill in question is put into law, it must first pass a vote in the House of Representatives and then be signed by the President.

The vote was conducted in strict alignment with party lines: all fifty of the “yes” votes for the bill were made by Republican senators, and all forty-eight “no” votes were made by Democratic senators. Only two senators, Republicans Rand Paul and Johnny Isakson, abstained from voting on the bill. Both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans, meaning that if the vote is conducted in a similarly partisan way in the House of Representatives, it will be sent to the President to be either signed or vetoed.

The vote was conducted under the Congressional Review Act, passed in 1996, which allows Congress to pass legislation to prevent government regulations from going into effect. Once regulations are repealed under the Congressional Review Act, the cannot be reinstated by the same method by which they were originally put into place; as such, if the bill to repeal these regulations on internet privacy is passed into law, the FCC won’t be able to reinstate similar regulation. For Republicans, one advantage of using the Congressional Review Act to roll back Obama-era regulations is that it prevents Democrats from filibustering the bill.

Privacy advocates have expressed their outrage about the vote online. Several online sources, as well as Democrats in the Senate, have warned that the personal information ISPs are able to collect about internet users is vast; through analysis of what websites users visit, ISPs are able to infer data about a user’s financial data, their relationships, their political views, and so on. And if the federal government passes a bill allowing ISPs to sell this data, preventing regulations on this matter from being enacted in the future, ISPs are likely to become more aggressive in profiting off of the sharing of users’ personal information, consumer privacy advocates argue.

Defenders of the bill see the issue from a different angle. They claim that, under these regulations, different categories of internet companies would be held to different standards; companies which generate revenue from advertising based on their users’ personal data, such as Facebook and Google, are currently allowed to collect and share this information freely, unless a user intentionally opts-out of this process. As the behavior of these advertising companies would not be regulated under the FCC, proponents of the bill argue that allowing these regulations to go into effect would negatively impact competition by holding ISPs to a different standard than other companies. Unsurprisingly, those who stand to benefit financially from the bill, such as advertising companies and internet service providers, are opposed to the regulation in question.

One of the ways that ordinary citizens can get involved in this issue, as well as other bills voted on by Congress, is to contact their elected representatives. By doing so, citizens can voice their interests on particular issues directly to the people that represent them, including Senators and Representatives. Although elected officials are not obligated to follow the recommendations of the voters who contact them, informing representatives of the opinions of their constituents helps to give them an idea of how to act in order to increase the probability of being successfully re-elected.

Featured image via Pixabay

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