Senate votes to kill privacy rules guarding your online info

NEW YORK (AP) - The Senate voted to kill Obama-era online privacy regulations, a first step toward allowing internet providers such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to sell your browsing habits and other personal information as they expand their own online ad businesses.

Those rules, not yet in effect, would have required internet providers to ask your permission before sharing your personal information. That's a much stronger privacy-protection weapon than letting them use your data until you tell them to stop. As anyone who has ever tried to stop getting targeted ads on the internet knows, opting out is hard.

Without those protections, consumer advocates fear that broadband providers will be able to do what they like with people's data.

"Advertisers and marketers are lining up to get access to all the information that's now available about us," said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, which advocates for tougher internet privacy measures.

ONLINE PRIVACY? WHAT ONLINE PRIVACY?

Of course, Google and Facebook already track you. But proponents of the privacy measure argued the company that sells you your internet connection can see even more about you: every website you visit, every app you use, everyone you message. Telecom companies argue companies like Google know far more about users than they do.

Undoing the Federal Communications Commission's regulation leaves people's online information in a murky area. Today, you can tell a broadband provider not to use your data. Experts said federal law still requires broadband providers to protect customer information - but it doesn't spell out how or what companies must do.

That's what the now endangered rules from the Federal Communications Commission aimed to do. "There's kind of a void," Perkins Coie telecom attorney Marc Martin said.

BUIDLING DIGITAL-AD BUSINESSESES

Cable companies, cellphone carriers and the advertising industry attacked the FCC rules as an overreach. Having to get permission from customers to use their browsing and app histories would likely make it more difficult to build stronger ad businesses, as telecomcompanies want to do.

Internet companies like Google operate under laxer requirements and don't have to ask users' permission before tracking what sites they visit. Republicans and industry groups have blasted that discrepancy, saying it was unfair and confusing for consumers.