Selling Our Internet Activity

Privacy and BusinessRegulation
Written By Timothy Henry
IMG_2360-1.jpg

In March, 2017, Congress voted to eliminate rules that "would have required home Internet and mobile broadband providers to get consumers' opt-in consent before selling or sharing Web browsing history, app usage history, and other private information with advertisers and other companies."  -- Ars Technica, 3/29/2017

You can get more information on this decision from this article and the additional references the article links to:

ISPs and FCC Chair Ajit Pai celebrate death of online privacy rules

Research, Analyze, Decide, Propose

  1. Consider that you are a staffer for the FCC. Write at least a 300-word response that will be posted on the FCC web site for consumers that explains the benefits and reasoning behind this decision.
     
  2. Assume the role of a privacy advocate in the district of RI Representative James Langevine. Write your post as if it was a memo to Mr. Langevine explaining why he should vote against revoking these rules.
     
  3. Vote with a "Like" on the FCC response and Langevine memo that you feel was the most persuasive and write a short paragraph explaining why.

I encourage you to dig into this topic with information from the textbook and additional online resources. At the end of each post, be sure to include links to any references you used other than the above URL and textbook.

Timothy Henry

Tim began his IT career as an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, and among his early tours, he was the Information Resources Manager (what is today a CIO) at the Coast Guard's training center in Yorktown, VA. This was during the early days of personal computers and the automation and networking of many management, financial and training activities led to a tremendous number of interesting challenges.

Dr. Henry then switched over to education and taught mathematics and computer science courses at the U. S. Coast Guard Academy. As his time there ended, he was offered a great opportunity to work with 'bleeding-edge' technology in a research and development environment. These projects involved cellular phones, GPS and touch screen technologies as components of larger integrated systems at a time when those technologies were just coming into the market place. He oversaw projects for law enforcement, first responders, healthcare, and education. For the next decade he continued to work as a project manager on large corporate- or state-wide information systems. During that time, he obtained his Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. 

He then returned to a university setting where he has been teaching in a broad array of computer science and information technology fields for over 15 years. He now serves as IT Graduate Director at the New England Institute of Technology. While at NEIT, Dr. Henry has developed and taught courses in a number of areas including programming, software engineering, databases, game development, operating systems, digital forensics, cybersecurity, ethics and project management. In addition to co-authoring A Gift of Fire: Social, Legal and Ethical Issues for Computing Technology with Sara Baase, which won the 2018 Excellence Award from the TAA, he has co-authored two data structure textbooks with Frank Carrano, Data Structures and Abstractions with Java and Data Abstractions and Problem Solving in C++: Walls & Mirrors which won the 2018 McGuffey Longevity Award from the TAA.

https://timothyhenry.net
Previous

Ballot Selfies
Next

Social Rating Systems