Breaking Down the FCC's Proposal to Protect Broadband Privacy

[Commentary] At its March 31 public meeting, the agency voted 3-2 in favor of releasing a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (called an “NPRM”) on “Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services.” The almost 150-page document -- containing more than 500 questions for public comment -- is the Commission's blueprint for broadband consumer privacy protections.

Initial public comments on these questions are due at the end of May. These rules are much needed for Internet users and long overdue. As the Commission notes in the NPRM, “absent legally-binding principles, those [broadband] networks have the commercial motivation to use and share extensive and personal information about their customers.” Companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon are the gateways to the Internet and everything on it. By virtue of their position, they have near unfettered access to data about the websites we visit, to our unencrypted online communications, and records of all the apps and services we use. The NPRM rightly takes the privacy protections afforded to customers of other types of common carriers, like telephone providers, and applies the core privacy principles of “transparency, choice, and security” to broadband. At its root the proceeding focuses on ways to give Internet users control over the private information collected by broadband providers.