The FCC has recently imposed limits on what type of information an ISP can gather on their users without expressly getting consent from the users opting in. The FCC statement released on this topic says that telecommunications carriers need to protect the privacy of their customers. It is now required that ISPs get customers to opt in if they want to collect information such as:
• Precise geo-Location of the user
• Information on Children
• Health Related Information
• Financial Information
• Social Security Numbers
• Web Browsing History
• App Usage History
• Content of Communications
Opt out options must also be present for collecting non-personally identifiable information, or the information listed above that has been cleaned so it is no longer personally identifiable.
When the FCC made these new rules and regulations, however, it seems they failed to do one important thing.
The ‘opt-in’ that is required can be a part of any normal Terms of Service agreement that 99.9% of people simply scroll through and click accept. The new requirements from the FCC could be located on page 51 of 105, for example, and almost nobody will ever read about it. This means that consumers may have some additional protections on paper, but in reality that won’t be the case at all.
