Trump Just Gave Away Your Privacy to Hackers and Spies

For the last month or so Donald Trump has been whining about how the privacy of his associates who were consorting with Russian spies was violated when their names were released to the press.

But yesterday Trump signed a law passed by Republicans on a party-line vote that got rid of privacy rules enacted by the FCC under Obama:

The bill repeals regulations adopted in October by the Federal Communications Commission under the Obama administration requiring internet service providers to do more to protect customers' privacy than websites like Alphabet Inc's Google or Facebook Inc.

The rules had not yet taken effect but would have required internet providers to obtain consumer consent before using precise geolocation, financial information, health information, children's information and web browsing history for advertising and marketing.

This means that Trump and the Republicans want your ISP to be able to sell your browsing history.

This is a gross violation of our personal privacy. What it means is that your ISP can sell your browsing history to any private detective, your ex-wife, your employer, Russian and Chinese spies, and literally anybody who wants to see what you're doing.

It also means that the government doesn't have to get a search warrant to look at your internet activity. They can just buy it from your ISP since it's freely available public information.

To make it even worse, hackers and and cyber criminals can also buy this information from your ISP. This will give them data like your home address, your email address, your search history, what porn sites you visit, what music you listen to, what Facebook and Twitter pages you visit, what computer games you play, what news sites you read, what email provider you use, and what banks you use.

It will also let hackers and criminals figure out when you're home, where you are during the day, where you're going and what you're doing.

This kind of information makes it trivial for hackers to automatically target people directly with highly effective spear-phishing attacks specifically tailored to customers on a massive scale, without having to hack a bank's records to find out who their customers are.

Instead of spamming millions of people with phony emails from Bank of America, they can specifically target Bank of America customers with information gleaned from the URLs that will make the phony emails almost impossible to distinguish from official emails sent from the bank.

Sloppy programming can inadvertently embed delicate information in your internet traffic, without the hackers having to spy on you in real time. When they find a bug in an website, they can instantly exploit it, knowing exactly who deals with that website.

This poses a huge risk to the nation's financial security, not to mention our personal privacy. This will allow hackers and spies to more effectively target employees of major financial institutions and government agencies.

Trump whines like a little bitch when his minions get caught conspiring with the Russians. But he's just fine with letting Russian hackers and spies watch every single thing Americans do on the web.