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A comment on Anger as US internet privacy law scrapped. Parent comment

Re:Anger as US internet privacy law scrapped by rybosome on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @02:32AM (#13983921)
1) Yes, Google has a lot of services, but you can avoid them. Admittedly it's challenging but it's doable. For many Americans, choosing a different ISP isn't "challenging" so much as "impossible".

2) Google doesn't sell your data to third parties. This is a big one. They make money by showing you ads and reporting to the advertisers that they did it. Nobody else gets access to your data, and Google goes to great lengths to lock it down and prevent unauthorized access. Do you trust every company your ISP will sell the data to?

3) Google itself has ways to opt out temporarily for highly sensitive things, like with an incognito window. Can't do that with an ISP.

4) You generate a lot of traffic that Google has nothing to do with. Do you have an iPhone? Do you use a laptop other than a chrome book? Have a gaming console? Use a non-chrome browser? Your ISP will inhale all of this.

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Re:Anger as US internet privacy law scrapped by dcow on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @03:24AM (#13984117)
Great points. I'm personally tying to avoid Google services as much as possible, but I guess I was thinking in a more general context. Even so, your points still stand. (Small obligatory remark: incognito is entirely client side.)

The silver lining might be, considering your ISP can now access your data, that maybe the culture will shift and people will take online privacy a little more seriously, both applicastion and services providers and users. Maybe people will stop sending user analytics in plain text all the time. Maybe people will expect tls everywhere. Maybe a layer 3.5 overnet will emerge..

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