Newsroom

Political data firms on both sides of the aisle have bolstered their addressable TV capabilities. Today, Democratic data firm TargetSmart and Republican data outfit Data Trust each announced new partnerships with TV data providers. The outcome should be even more TV spots, especially from congressional campaigns, targeted to households of key voter segments than ever before. Data Trust, the data firm that manages a national voter file for Republicans and right-leaning groups, has partnered with FourthWall Media to match FourthWall's cable viewership data to Data Trust's voter data. The result will be a feed of TV viewer data updated daily and matched against Data Trust's voting history and demographic data. It was a year ago at the Democratic National Committee's summer meeting in Minneapolis when Democratic data firm TargetSmart Communications unveiled the addressable TV and digital ad targeting capabilities it developed with data services firm Experian. Today, TargetSmart expanded its TV data offerings through a partnership with Tru Optik, which provides media consumption data for digital media and connected TV devices such as Roku, Xbox, and smart TVs. The company also has TV data deals with Rentrak and D2 Media Sales, which is a partnership between DISH and DirecTV/AT&T. "We're trying to get as many partnerships out there as possible," said Bill Russell, director of digital partnerships at TargetSmart. These sorts of voter and TV data deals are bringing the targeting capabilities of online advertising to TV ad buys, which historically have resulted in some wasted spending for political campaigns that would do better to target ads to desired voter groups rather than those less likely to support their candidates. The new approaches have grown in popularity following the 2012 election, when President Obama's re-election campaign famously employed innovative data-crunching methods for buying TV ads aimed at voters through programming rarely purchased by political advertisers. By partnering with more and more TV data and media firms, political data companies are bringing what was once accessible only to large statewide or national campaigns to smaller, down-ballot candidates. Through such relationships, political advertisers can reach pre-defined voter segments, such as likely Democratic or Republican voters, or custom groups of voters. --- For the full article, visit http://bit.ly/2wDaz4s (link is external)

Personal health wearable devices that consumers are using to monitor their heart rates, sleep patterns, calories, and even stress levels raise new privacy and security risks, according to a report released today by researchers at American University and the Center for Digital Democracy. Watches, fitness bands, and so-called “smart” clothing, linked to apps and mobile devices, are part of a growing “connected-health” system in the U.S., promising to provide people with more efficient ways to manage their own health. But while consumers may think that federal laws will protect their personal health information collected by wearables, the report found that the weak and fragmented health-privacy regulatory system fails to provide adequate safeguards. The report, Health Wearable Devices in the Big Data Era: Ensuring Privacy, Security, and Consumer Protection, provides an overview and analysis of the major features, key players, and trends that are shaping the new consumer-wearable and connected-health marketplace.“Many of these devices are already being integrated into a growing Big Data digital-health and marketing ecosystem, which is focused on gathering and monetizing personal and health data in order to influence consumer behavior,” the report explains. As the use of these devices becomes more widespread, and as their functionalities become increasingly sophisticated, “the extent and nature of data collection will be unprecedented.”The report documents a number of current digital-health marketing practices that threaten the privacy of consumer health information, including “condition targeting,” “look-alike modeling,” predictive analytics, “scoring,” and the real-time buying and selling of individual consumers. The technology of wearable devices makes them particularly powerful tools for data collection and digital marketing. For example, smartphones and other mobile devices already provide access to users’ location information, enabling marketers to target individuals wherever they are, based on analyses of “visitation patterns” and a host of other behavioral and demographic data.The report also explains how an emerging set of techniques and Big-Data practices are being developed to harness the unique capabilities of wearables—such as biosensors that track bodily functions, and “haptic technology” that enables users to “feel” actual body sensations. Pharmaceutical companies are poised to be among the major beneficiaries of wearable marketing.The report offers suggestions for how government, industry, philanthropy, nonprofit organizations, and academic institutions can work together to develop a comprehensive approach to health privacy and consumer protection in the era of Big Data and the Internet of Things. These include:Clear, enforceable standards for both the collection and use of information;Formal processes for assessing the benefits and risks of data use; andStronger regulation of direct-to-consumer marketing by pharmaceutical companies.“The connected-health system is still in an early, fluid stage of development,” explained Kathryn C. Montgomery, PhD, professor at American University and a co-author of the report. “There is an urgent need to build meaningful, effective, and enforceable safeguards into its foundation.”Such efforts “will require moving beyond the traditional focus on protecting individual privacy, and extending safeguards to cover a range of broader societal goals, such as ensuring fairness, preventing discrimination, and promoting equity,” the report says.“In the wake of the recent election, the United States is on the eve of a major public debate over the future of its health-care system,” the report notes. “The potential of personal digital devices to reduce health-care spending will likely play an important role,” as lawmakers deliberate the fate of the Affordable Care Act. However, unless there are adequate regulatory safeguards in place, “consumers and patients could face serious risks to their privacy and security, and also be subjected to discrimination and other harms.”“Americans now face a growing loss of their most sensitive information, as their health data are collected and analyzed on a continuous basis, combined with information about their finances, ethnicity, location, and online and off-line behaviors,” said Jeff Chester, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy, and another co-author of the report. “Policy makers must act decisively to protect consumers in today’s Big Data era.”The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation provided funding for the report.The three authors of the report —Kathryn Montgomery, Jeff Chester, and Katharina Kopp—have played a leading role on digital privacy issues, and were responsible for the campaign during the 1990s that led to enactment by Congress of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).---Full report attached.

FourthWall Media and Data Trust announced a partnership that will create a unique feed utilizing Data Trust’s comprehensive data warehouse. Data Trust will connect FourthWall’s census-level television viewership data to its GOP dataset of over 190 million American voters from all 50 states. The integrated solution will help allied analytics companies build media and television-centric targeting solutions for their customers. “Data Trust is committed to compiling and providing access to the foundational data right-of-center political and advocacy organizations need to persuade voters and win this November,” said John DeStefano, president of Data Trust. “Combining FourthWall’s television viewership data with the historical data only Data Trust offers will help our customers access more complete datasets than anyone else.” Data Trust will use FourthWall’s anonymous household matching tool to sync with Data Trust’s voter file and create a unique feed of viewership information updated daily. Data Trust’s depth allows clients to append other information to those matched households, such as demographics, voting history and the like. As analytics firms and media buyers become more sophisticated, the ability to look at the TV viewing behavior of certain groups, such as first time Hispanic voters, becomes more and more valuable in the battle for votes and persuasion. --- For the full article, visit http://bit.ly/2wDaz4s (link is external)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Advocates called today on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reject an effort by major media companies to eliminate or weaken important rules for children’s television. The National Association of Broadcasters, Internet and Television Association (NCTA), CBS, Disney, Fox, Univision, and others have asked the FCC to significantly reduce advertising limits on children’s programming. Industry commenters also urged the FCC to reconsider rules that require broadcasters to provide quality educational programming as part of their obligation to serve the public interest. In comments filed today, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy called on the FCC to reject industry proposals to repeal or modify the current rules. “The Trump Administration and the FCC should stand up for the rights of children and parents and reject this crass campaign by the broadcast lobby,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “The broadcast industry receives billions of dollars in benefits from its free use of public resources, including invaluable rights to the airwaves. It is unconscionable that TV stations and networks want to kill off one of their few remaining obligations to the public.” In April, the FCC issued a public notice on its “Modernization of Media Regulation Initiative,” asking for suggestions about which of the FCC’s media-related rules should be modified or repealed. Media companies replied with a deregulation wish list that would allow them to use kids’ television programming to market directly to children. The major networks urged the FCC to relax its rules prohibiting product integration and product placement on kids’ shows, arguing that YouTube and other child-directed online services are not subject to those restrictions. Advocates responded by pointing out that internet and mobile providers are simply ignoring longstanding children’s media principles, which are based on child development, and that a lack of online regulation is not a good reason for the FCC to eliminate important safeguards for the millions of children who watch traditional TV. “It is extremely disappointing that broadcasters want to join the race to the bottom when it comes to exploiting children’s developmental vulnerabilities for profit,” said Josh Golin, executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. “Media companies want to gut longstanding safeguards because young people an incredibly lucrative market for advertisers. But research demonstrates that children are particularly vulnerable to marketing and benefit from rules that require ad limits and separation of programming and commercial content.” Advocates also oppose a request by the Internet and Television Association to repeal an FCC rule known as the “website display rule.” The FCC adopted this rule in 2004 to prohibit advertisers from engaging in “host-selling” to children, which the transition to digital broadcasting could otherwise allow. Angela J. Campbell, director of the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown and counsel to some of the advocates, called the effort to repeal this rule disingenuous. “The media companies say the website display rule is unnecessary because television has rarely been used to interact and target advertising to children,” she said. “But at the same time, these companies engaging in a practice known as ‘programmatic marketing,’ which offers advertisers the ability to target ads to specific viewers of cable and broadcast television programming.” In addition, advocates oppose efforts by media companies to be relieved of their public interest obligation to provide educational programming for children, and to produce public reports to help the FCC determine whether that programming meets the obligations laid out in the Children’s Television Act. “The television industry made a commitment to serve the nation’s children by providing quality educational programs,” explained Professor Kathryn Montgomery of American University, who led the effort to strengthen the FCC’s rules on the Children’s Television Act. “However, broadcasters failed to live up to these minimal obligations and the FCC has been irresponsible in allowing the industry to evade one of its only remaining public interest requirements. Rather than considering elimination of these rules, the FCC (and Congress) should conduct an investigation into TV programming and advertising practices directed at children.” ---- The comments can be read via the attached PDF file below.

FameBit is an online marketplace that connects YouTubers with brands that are interested in advertising their products and services. This provides creators an opportunity to earn money with their content by partnering with brands that are relevant to their audience. Learn about Famebit, the Self-Service Influencer Marketing Platform. For more information, visit https://famebit.com/brands (link is external)

The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), a leading US NGO specializing in consumer data protection issues in the digital marketplace, is pleased to respond to the request that we provide information applicable to first annual review of the EUUS Privacy Shield. CDD has been assessing the Privacy Shield since it came into force in 2016, in part as a result of its work coordinating the activities from the US side of the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) working group on the Information Society. EU citizens and consumers who deal with companies enrolled in the Privacy Shield program confront a serious erosion of their data protection and privacy rights. The rights of EU citizens under the Privacy Shield program are not equivalent to how they would be protected by EU law. We urge the Commission and EU Data Protection Authorities to suspend the Privacy Shield in light of its lack of any policies, rules, or enforcement that would provide meaningful adequacy or equivalency. The Commission should insist that U.S. companies targeting EU citizens or consumers must operate under the forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) framework. For this submission, we reviewed the activities of several major U.S. companies enrolled in the Privacy Shield program, examining their submissions on the U.S. Commerce Department website (including descriptions of their activities, the link to and content of their privacy policy statements). We compared these statements to the actual data collection and use-related activities conducted by the companies, including their own descriptions of how they operationalize their business goals. We supplemented this analysis with the information that CDD extensively gathers on the commercial digital marketplace, such as automated “programmatic” decision making and other contemporary consumer-directed applications. --- For the full PDF of the letter, see attachment in link below.

Public Knowledge joined by the Consumer Federation of America, the Center For Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of California, and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse writes a letter urging the Federal Trade Commission Acting Chairman, Maureen Ohlhausen, to protect consumer privacy. The letter is asking the FTC Chairwoman to publicly and expeditiously resolve a pending complaint concerning cable TV and satellite TV privacy. --- June 12, 2017 Maureen Ohlhausen Acting Chairman Federal Trade Commission 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20580 Dear Acting Chairman Ohlhausen: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has long protected consumer privacy, in tandem with other agencies, and you recently reiterated your dedication to protecting consumer privacy in the digital age through FTC enforcement. We therefore urge the FTC to quickly resolve the complaint filed one year ago by a coalition of consumer advocates. The complaint provides evidence that the nation’s cable and satellite providers have and continue to deceive consumers about their privacy practices by failing to provide adequate notice, in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act. Since the complaint was filed, leading Internet Service Providers, cable and telephone companies have significantly expanded their ability to gather, analyze and make actionable data that is used to target subscribers, their families, and other consumers. --- See the link below for the full PDF of the complaint.

The new report by Cracked Labs titled "Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life" with contributions by CDD's Katharina Kopp, provides a powerful overview of the commercial surveillance infastructure, key players and trends. The report is available as a ten-part overview online (link is external) and as a free, detailed 93-page PDF (link is external).

Chart: Here’s How 5 Tech Giants Make Their Billions Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist (link is external) For the full article visit, http://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-5-tech-giants-make-billions/ (link is external)

Facebook should immediately release all documents describing how it collected and analyzed psychological information it recently (link is external) collected about its youngest users, some as young as 14, and college students, Public Citizen and a coalition of 25 groups said in a letter (link is external) to the corporation today. The groups are concerned about how this information might have been used or may be used in the future by marketers and others to take advantage of young people’s emotions, all without users’ knowledge. Marketing companies and Facebook have secretly moved to tap into teens’ emotions and developmental vulnerabilities strictly for profit, the letter says. The groups want to know how the data was used, when it was used, how many users were impacted and the names of the companies that received the data. “What began as a way for college students to keep in touch has morphed into a platform for brand-saturated marketing and psychological manipulation,” said Kristen Strader, campaign coordinator for Public Citizen’s Commercial Alert campaign. “It is incumbent upon Facebook as a cultural leader to protect, not exploit, the privacy of young people, especially when their vulnerable emotions are involved.” According to The Australian (link is external) newspaper, Facebook presented research to one of its advertisers that shows it collects sensitive data regarding young users’ emotions and “mood shifts.” The research detailed how Facebook can analyze sensitive user data in real time to determine how young users are communicating emotion, and at which points during the week they are doing so, the letter continued. Facebook’s research was conducted without users’ knowledge, which raises ethical concerns. “Because Facebook plays such a powerful role in the lives of teens, it must adopt a policy that respects and protects them,” said Dr. Kathryn Montgomery, professor of communication at American University and a consultant to the Center for Digital Democracy. “This should include not only strong safeguards for its advertising and data practices, but also clear limits on the kinds of research it conducts for marketing purposes. Under no circumstances should marketers be using emotional states, stress levels, biometric information or other highly sensitive data to target users. And this should apply to both young people and adults.” “Facebook needs to come clean and publicly release the full internal document, reported in The Australian, describing how Facebook collected and analyzed psychological information on high school students, college students and young users, said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, European Union co-chair of the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue. “The burden of proof is on Facebook to document publicly that they don’t collect and use such information. We are concerned that companies don’t overreach and abuse their users’ fundamental right to privacy and data protection.” The public, its users and elected officials have a right to know how pervasive this research was, who was affected and how the company will ensure it does not occur again, the groups said. The only way to fully address those concerns is to publicly release the internal document and related materials, accompanied by a more detailed explanation from Facebook of what was intended, what happened and the company’s actual practices, the letter says. —30— --- See full PDF of letter to Facebook below.

The ease of promoting and profiting from fake news (link is external), the use of social media to spread disinformation and twist the truth and the ability to microtarget voters on all their devices reveal how political campaigns and special-interest groups are taking full advantage of the “Big Data”-driven digital marketing system that Google and Facebook have helped unleash. Campaigns now have needle-in-the-haystack capabilities, provided by commercial marketing and media companies, to find and motivate an individual voter. The Trump team (link is external), for example, was able to identify someone from rural America who felt “disenfranchised (link is external),” had not voted in recent elections (and didn’t show up in polls as a likely voter), and then use a data-and-digital-concocted brew to trigger emotions and behavior (link is external). Behind the digital curtain that informs and entertains is a commercial surveillance system whose function until recently has been primarily to sell us junk food (link is external), credit cards and retail products (link is external). But in 2016, the system was fully deployed for political gain. Just take a look at the techniques used by the Trump, Clinton, Sanders (link is external) and other political campaigns that describe how they reached and influenced voters. They are right out of the digital advertisers playbook: IP address (link is external) targeting, geofencing (link is external), pixel profiles (link is external), Data Management Platforms (DMPs) (link is external), algorithms (link is external), data onboarding (link is external), moment scoring (link is external), header bidding (link is external), and programmatic advertising (link is external). Electoral campaigns — from all sides — are fusing cookies (link is external) (data files placed on our web browsers) with information gathered by consumer data companies (link is external) along with our voter files (link is external), which illustrates how our commercial pursuits and political interests are being merged today. Advances in the best way to use all the information routinely captured and analyzed about us, and which has been greatly expanded by our use of mobile phones and apps, have helped companies to create highly detailed personal dossiers that merge our online and offline information, make predictions about how we — or others like us — will respond, and then orchestrate desired behaviors. Google boasts to its advertisers, for example, that it can help them connect with us in a “micromoment (link is external)” — just at the point when we may make some decision. Facebook, for its part, assures marketers they can use its system to influence the decisions of “real people (link is external).” There is little standing in the way of a Trump, Clinton or any other political effort from easily acquiring access to the huge reams of personal information now available (link is external) through commercial data companies, sold by publishers and online enterprises (link is external) and used to target us (link is external) when we log on to social media such as Facebook. The digital marketing and data industry has largely been immune from any regulation under the Obama administration, either on consumer data collection practices or business operations. The US is still one of the only advanced-economy countries (link is external) without comprehensive privacy legislation (link is external), and what little we have is already under threat (link is external). For the vast majority of Americans, there is practically no legal way to turn off or stem the flow of their information. The government’s “hands-off” approach to how Facebook, Google and the rest of the digital marketing industry operate has helped unleash powerful and unaccountable forces that helped elect our next president. Political campaigns can buy data from internet and other companies about our finances (link is external), health concerns, race, ethnicity (link is external), shopping behavior (link is external) and geo-location, along with what we read online and what our political interests are. Leading data companies including Nielsen (link is external), Neustar (link is external), Oracle (link is external) and Acxiom (link is external) sell this information to political campaigns and others working to influence public opinion. Political data firms such as Cambridge Analytica (link is external), which worked for Trump, layer on predictive modeling and psychological tools (link is external) to help identify “personality traits,” behavior and “what really drives … decision making.” Trump’s White House chief strategist Steve Bannon sits on its board (link is external). This company, which also helped support the Brexit “Leave” initiative (link is external), says it has compiled “5,000 (link is external) data points on over 220 million Americans (link is external).” Cambridge Analytica is the US affiliate (link is external) of the SCL Group (link is external) in the UK, which engages in political (link is external), commercial (link is external) and defense (link is external) work (including “PSYOPS (link is external)” — psychological operations). According to its website, SCL’s specialties include “behavioural polling, behavioural microtargeting, StratCom and target audience analysis” (a service it is helping NATO (link is external) perfect). SCL’s operations illustrate how data analysis is being used today, from trying to win “hearts and minds” in Afghanistan (link is external) to selling us Big Macs or a President Donald Trump. According to the company (link is external), they “combine commercial and public big-data sets with large-scale quantitative research to predict everything from whether people are likely to vote through to what products and services they are most likely to buy.” Its work with political campaigns takes advantage of the “predictive power of data” and uses “physio-lingual analysis tools to uncover subconscious … reasoning (link is external).” Such capabilities benefited Trump, who only won because, as Cambridge Analytica itself wrote (link is external), “The president-elect flipped Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by margins of less than 2 percent. If Hillary Clinton had taken those last three states, she would have won the election. Trump won those three states by a combined margin of approximately 107,000 votes.” The company also explained: The 2016 presidential election showed that the use of data to identify, persuade and turn out voters has become increasingly sophisticated. Cambridge Analytica’s data science, digital marketing and research teams informed key decisions on campaign travel, communications and resource allocation.... Every week Cambridge Analytica collected responses from 1,500 to 2,000 people in each battleground state. It used this research and data to model scores for all voters across key states: which candidate they preferred, which were "persuadable," the issues they cared about and how likely they were to actually vote on Election Day. Every voter in each battleground state was also segmented by ethnicity, religion and the issues that concerned them most…. When, in the final weeks of the race, the firm’s data scientists recalculated voter turnout and recalibrated their models to show how Donald Trump could win, the GOP candidate revisited states like Michigan and Wisconsin…. Online ads placed by the firm were viewed a staggering 1.5 billion times by millions of Americans …. If Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the Titanic, then Donald Trump’s campaign was a speedboat: nimble, flexible and able to adapt fast.” The Trump campaign also used digital targeting to conduct “major voter suppression operations,” according to a report in Bloomberg (link is external), focusing on African-Americans, young women and white liberals — with tools including an onslaught of what are called “dark posts (link is external)” on Facebook. These targeted messages included “a South Park-style animation of Hilary Clinton delivering her infamous 1996 'super predator' remarks." Marketers use dark posts to deliver targeted content to only on the Facebook newsfeeds (link is external) of individuals, not on the ones operated by the companies that generate them. Giles-Parscale, another online marketing firm working for Trump (link is external), was part of “Project Alamo (link is external),” a digital data initiative spearheaded by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing (link is external),” said Brad Parscale, who is now assembling a nonprofit advocacy group (link is external) designed to press Trump’s agenda from outside the White House. How Trump, Kushner and their operatives use the considerable data assets controlled by the White House (which was expanded under Obama (link is external)) and work with their new outside digital operation should raise concerns, at the very least, from civil libertarians and others. Google and Facebook likely will continue to be friendly ports of call for Trump and the GOP. They provide a host of services to both major political parties’ campaigns and have benefited from the Big Money (link is external) pouring into them to target voters online. To help campaigns “understand the influence of digital media and online video in the 2016 elections,” Google hired (link is external) Republican pollster Frank Luntz (link is external), along with Julie Hootkin from the Global Strategy Group (link is external), to offer insights as “guest editors” on the company’s principal website set up for advertisers. Google also promoted (link is external) ways political advertisers could take advantage of YouTube (link is external), its search engine and all its other tools for marketers. It offered this advice: “Voter decisions used to be made in living rooms, in front of televisions. Today, they're increasingly made in micromoments, on mobile devices.” The GOP was reported to have awarded Google a major share of its “largest digital ad deal ever,” earmarking $150 million to buy online video ads, according to Ad Age (link is external) last May. Facebook also offers targeting opportunities (link is external) for political campaigns (link is external), which are encouraged to buy ads and other products to appeal to its more than 162 million US users, enabling campaigns (link is external) to target by age, gender, congressional district and interests. Campaigns can also supply their own data to Facebook, which will help them target (link is external) individuals. Facebook has promoted as an advertising “success” story (link is external) its fundraising targeting for the conservative group Judicial Watch, which included a mobile ad (pictured right) prominently featuring a headshot of Hillary Clinton alongside the headline, “Hillary’s Email Scandal Exposed.” The case study explains, “Advanced matching for Custom Audiences is a targeting tool that allows advertisers to upload multiple data points at once to create an audience on Facebook. Data points include general information like first and last name, ZIP code, state, country, age and gender, and also email, phone number, mobile advertiser ID and Facebook app user ID.” So many companies (link is external) now specialize in or supply data to political campaigns, as well as offer ways to influence (link is external) voters more precisely (link is external). There are even data made available to Republican campaigns by Democratic-oriented companies. For example, data analytics specialist L2 (link is external), which has been helping Donald Trump since early 2015, offers a predictive modeling product (link is external) that scores voters on “likelihood of support” on dozens of issues, including their views of Black Lives Matter, church attendance, fracking, gun laws, gay marriage, the Mexican border wall, transgender bathrooms and many more. HaystaqDNA (link is external), a political data firm started by operatives of President Obama’s previous campaigns, sold some of its own data (link is external) to L2 (and which were used, according to a former Trump data official, to “pinpoint a specific type of would-be supporter.”) But it’s more than just data gathering and online targeting that concerns privacy and democracy advocates. Pursuing monetization at any cost overwhelms what’s left of the boundaries that separate news from advertising or purposefully deceptive content — and the public is being conditioned to accept (link is external) fake as real. The online giants have effectively fashioned a brand-focused online echo chamber

President Trump has killed the first real protections for commercial privacy that Americans have online. Phone and cable giants, allied with the GOP Congressional majority, have just voted to overturn the historic consumer-data safeguards adopted last year by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). AT&T, Comcast, Verizon—the country’s dominant providers of high speed broadband—along with industry and Congressional GOP allies, intensely opposed the new FCC rule. Why? Merely because it gives Americans some say in whether their sensitive information, such as web browsing activity and geo-location, can be used for digital marketing purposes. That’s right. The new FCC safeguard that was tossed into the legislative waste bin merely says that ISPs must first ask for permission before they can take this personal data in order to target us. Such an “opt-in” approach, requiring prior informed consent, is heretical to digital marketers, whose profits depend on using all of our information without ever really having to ask to do so. Until the FCC stepped in, it was the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that served as the primary federal agency handling Internet privacy. But unlike the FCC, which can readily issue regulations to protect the public, the FTC is constrained from doing so. More than three decades ago, the advertising industry successfully lobbied Congress to curb that agency’s rulemaking authority (during a fight over another media issue—whether there should be limits on children’s advertising). Primarily, the FTC can only punish companies that engage in “unfair” or “deceptive” acts—such as lying to customers about how they use or protect our information. But if a company writes a privacy policy that basically provides them with unlimited access to all our data—which is what they do—the FTC is basically powerless to do anything at all. Which is why the phone and cable giants—along with Google and Facebook—prefer the FTC. It provides the illusion of having actual oversight and limits, when really nothing much is possible. Under the FTC’s watch, Americans have just experienced an unprecedented loss of their privacy. In the last few years, for example, digital marketers have aggressively pushed the boundaries of what information they gather from us and how it can be used. Our offline and online data is now routinely merged, generating “profiles” that connect our street address to the “cookies” and other online identifiers provided by our digital devices. Our precise geo-location is also regularly captured by mobile phones and “apps” that stealthily send our whereabouts to online companies and retail stores. Massive one-stop data broker “clouds” have emerged that provide reams of information, including about our finances, health, political interests, ethnicity—sold to marketers large and small. Our data “profiles”—digital dossiers—have become invaluable corporate assets that are bought and sold in milliseconds by powerful computers scattered across the globe, our identities traded for profit, as if they are just another commodity. Ongoing advances in how data are analyzed and used—so called “Big Data”—is ushering in even more ways companies can more precisely determine who we are, what we do, where we go, and how we should be treated. The leading phone and cable broadband ISPs have made major investments in tapping into the latest “Big Data” techniques. For example, Verizon recently introduced “Smartplay,” which helps deliver “smarter advertising” by creating what it calls “individual viewer personas that capture viewing history, account profile details and other valuable data….” Comcast Labs employs “Big Data research teams” that have expertise in “machine learning algorithms, forecasting models, intelligent image and video search, automated scene analysis, voice biometrics, recommender systems, personalization, and deep metadata.” AT&T is relying on its “Consumer Insights Platform” team to turn “big data into big insights….” ISPs also partner with leading data providers, such as Acxiom and Oracle, to enhance the robust details they already have about their broadband and video service subscribers. The big ISPs have also been on a shopping spree, acquiring companies that further their digital data advertising clout. Verizon acquired AOL and is now in the process of buying Yahoo; AT&T bought the leading satellite TV company, DirecTV, in part because of its digital ad capabilities; it now wants to fold Time Warner into its empire. Comcast has swallowed up ad-tech companies such as Visible World, FreeWheel, and StickyAds (and its NBC subsidiary has also embarked on its own formidable data-driven ad initiative). It is precisely because ISPs provide us access to residential broadband or wireless networks that they have a unique window into our lives. While Google and Facebook have their own far-reaching capabilities, they are primarily ad-supported marketing companies. When we pay a (hefty) monthly subscriber fee for Internet access, we should not also be exposed to having our Internet provider capture every bit of information it can, let alone tie that data together with what we do when we use our mobile and gaming devices or watch TV. The FCC’s new privacy rule builds on the agency’s network neutrality policy requiring that companies providing access to the Internet must operate in a fair and nondiscriminatory manner. Long-standing safeguards for protecting the privacy of our voice conversations over the telephone network have been brought into the 21st century—and now it’s also our broadband communications that must be respected. (Network neutrality is also under threat of elimination by the Trump FCC.) The ISPs and ad industry lobbyists disingenuously claim that having the FTC protect consumer privacy for all Internet companies, including ISPs and data giants like Google, is the most effective approach. It would be so, perhaps, if the FTC had any real clout. Many of the companies and trade groups urging that the FTC replace the FCC as a privacy regulator have lobbied against giving the trade commission actual authority to do so. They cynically know that turning over our broadband privacy to the FTC will mean business as usual—more of our offline and online data endlessly flowing into sophisticated databases that provide advertisers and other commercial entities (and perhaps government) detailed actionable blueprints of our lives. It will also mean that the only real potential privacy protection Americans have had to make their own mind up about whom to share data with and for what purpose will be lost. The ISPs, data-marketing companies, and their supporters are also fighting against the privacy rule because they know we are also on the eve of a new era—the Internet of Things—that will generate even more personal information about us. In today’s digital era, data is power. And that power should be in the hands of the people—not those that wish to financially and politically benefit by harvesting our information. --30-- President Trump has killed any hope that Americans would enjoy basic privacy protections online. By signing the bill, Mr. Trump has allied himself with the telecommunications and digital media giants who seek to profit from every detail of our lives. This is a betrayal of the American people and an insult to our democracy. All that the FCC safeguard did was to require cable and phone companies to ask for permission before they could profit from a person’s most sensitive information—including that individual’s web browsing, geo-location, financial details and data on children. President Trump helped the special interests and abandoned American families. Mr. Trump directly benefited from the absence of any federal privacy law or rule that protects having our information easily made available to commercial interests. His senior counselor Steve Bannon has been paid by and has investments in data-marketing firm Cambridge Analytica, which helped the Trump campaign. Mr. Bannon would have understood that the new federal privacy protections would enable the public to restrict the flow of commercial data going to political campaigns. We find this potential conflict of interest troubling, and it requires further scrutiny. (Kellyanne Conway was also a Cambridge Analytica consultant.) While today’s action by the president ends the FCC broadband privacy rule approved last October, we believe the public has also won something significant. For the first time, millions of Americans have been informed that they have little or no privacy on the Internet and when they use their mobile devices. Moreover, we have assembled one of the largest public-interest coalitions ever to advance consumer privacy protections. Many policymakers—on both sides of the aisle—have declared themselves as advocates for stronger protections. We will be back. But today, President Trump has given America a digital black eye before the world—a world in which most advanced nations understand that personal privacy is a fundamental democratic right. - Jeff Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington-DC-based consumer digital rights group.

The following can be attributed to Katharina Kopp, Policy Director, Center for Digital Democracy. --- Today’s House vote to overturn the first major Internet privacy protection for Americans, may be a win for ISP monopolies, but it’s a tragic loss for our democracy. Broadband providers, such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, will now be able to sell our sensitive information to the highest bidder without first receiving our permission. We believe today’s misguided vote will unleash even more “Big Data” profiling and tracking of Americans, and spur an array of discriminatory practices. Without any restraints, ISPs will dramatically erode what should be an important American fundamental right—that of privacy. If President Trump allows this bill to become law, his Administration will place new burdens on hard-working Americans and their families—who will be at the mercy of a handful of digital giants. CDD and our allies, here and in the EU, pledge to continue our fight against the special interests that have gained new ways to control how we use the Internet and other digital media. Contact: Jeff Chester Executive Director Center for Digital Democracy Washington, DC. www. democraticmedia.org jeff@democraticmedia.org (link sends e-mail) 202-494-7100