Comcast Would Love To Charge You More So It Won’t Have To Sell Your Information

Would you pay more for increased privacy? What if it includes information that you probably never knew was recorded or being sold in the first place? Enter Comcast.

Hot on the heels of an entire state suing Comcast for its deceptive practices, we learn of the company’s goal of persuading the FCC to allow it to charge customers extra if they want to opt out of so-called “snoopvertising”.

As DSL Reports highlights, the FCC has been in the process of drumming up details that would ultimately force ISPs to reveal exactly what information they’re collecting, and what they’re doing with it. In many cases, that “what they’re doing” is going to equal “selling to third-parties”. As we can now see, Comcast has no qualm about revealing such intent.

Flickr: Mike Mozart

In the FCC filing, Comcast believes it’s within its rights to deploy such a service:

A bargained-for exchange of information for service is a perfectly acceptable and widely used model throughout the U.S. economy, including the Internet ecosystem, and is consistent with decades of legal precedent and policy goals related to consumer protection and privacy.

If this is a widely used model in the US economy, I’m willing to bet that most consumers are not aware of it. Call me crazy, but I believe that if we hand over money to a company for their services, we as consumers should be able to expect a reasonable amount of privacy. I’m not sure many people would willingly opt to have their information sold – that just isn’t part of the deal. We pay you for a service, you give us a service. It’s simple.

If worse came to worst, and ISPs were in fact legally allowed to gather and sell information collected on you, would you be willing to fork over extra money to prevent it from happening? Or, would you quickly look for a replacement ISP?

Personally, I consider the mere idea of a company charging you an extra fee so that it won’t go behind your back and sell your information to be completely asinine. It simply shouldn’t be legal. I mentioned above the option of looking at another ISP, but the fact of the matter is, many in the United States do not have more than one option for an ISP, and even if they do, none of the options are guaranteed to be great. It’d be extremely unfortunate if the FCC deemed it appropriate to let ISPs price gouge customers just so they can retain a level of privacy they deserve.