Big Money for Broadband, A Risky Connection for You

Shopping for something online, streaming a video, or scrolling through an article all pose severe risks to personal privacy, as websites, platforms, apps, and tech companies collect massive amounts of data on their users. Just getting online in the first place, however, poses a great risk as well. Internet service providers (ISPs) are uniquely positioned to take advantage of personal data, as they have near-total access to all traffic flowing over their networks. Broadband providers routinely collect data on users’ locations, web browsing, app usage history, and more. In some cases, ISPs also collect data on content their users run across. New advancements in network technology, including private and public mesh networks, introduce new wrinkles to protecting privacy online that make the need for protections all the more urgent. People must be able to access the internet without giving up their privacy.

[Claire Park is a policy analyst with New America’s Open Technology Institute.]