14 DAY TRIAL // Cards Against Humanity creator Max Temkin joins the list of individuals ready to buy off the Congress browsing data now that they managed to repeal the FCC privacy regulations adopted during the Obama administration.
As you may already know, this week, the House of Representatives voted to allow ISPs to sell off people's private records, varying from contract details about name, social security number, and address, to browsing history. This can help paint a comprehensive picture about people, including their political affiliation, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and so on.
A couple of crowdfunding campaigns have already been launched to gather up the money to buy the browsing data of politicians who voted in favor of the repeal. One was started by an activist called Adam McElhaney, and a second by "Supernatural" actor Misha Collins.
But Cards Against Humanity creator Max Temkin says he won't be doing any fundraisers to get the cash needed to hit back against Republicans. Instead, he simply pledged to purchase and publish the browsing history of every Congress member and congressional aide. He even went on to warn others about these crowdfunding campaigns that seek to gather money to buy data that is not yet available.
In fact, this data, as he puts it, doesn't exist and isn't for sale yet. This, obviously, is a bit of a problem, because we may never actually get to see this information.
That's not how it works
ISPs may have been allowed to sell off people's data, but they don't single out individuals. In fact, this would be illegal no matter what the FCC does because the Telecommunications Act explicitly prohibits sharing of "individually identifiable" customer information except under very specific circumstances.
This could be bypassed, however, since the IP addresses of Congress members are known. In fact, they are already put to use by one Twitter account that sets out an alarm every time a Congress IP is used to edit a Wikipedia article. That means that there are some workarounds to the law, but it's still quite complicated.
It is unclear at this point what exactly will happen to all the money that these fundraisers have gathered already. Misha Collins said that, if his plans failed, the money would go to the ACLU. The author of the other campaign has yet to issue an alternative.