The FCC’s Important Move for Online Privacy

[Commentary] The postal service is not allowed to open your letters to read what you’ve written inside. It’s also not permitted to develop a list of your correspondents to sell to advertisers. Your telephone company is forbidden from listening in on your phone calls or selling the list of numbers you dial to marketers, at least not without your permission. It may surprise you to learn that these common sense privacy rules may not yet apply to your Internet service provider (ISP). The good news is that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plans to vote in a few weeks on sensible, modest rules of the road to give you the kind of privacy protections you probably already assume you have.
[Paul Ohm is a Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. He specializes in information privacy, computer crime law, intellectual property, and criminal procedure. He serves as a faculty director for the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown.]