Under the Radar, Big Media Internet Giants Get Massive Access to Everything About You

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Under the Radar, Big Media Internet Giants Get Massive Access to Everything About You

A White House-backed bill would give the corporate elite control over how our data is used.
By Jeffrey Chester / AlterNet

The Internet and our digital media are quietly becoming a pervasive and manipulative interactive surveillance system.  Leading U.S. online companies, while claiming to be strong supporters of an open and democratic Internet, are working behind the scenes to ensure that they have unlimited and unchecked power to “shadow” each of us online.  They have allied with global advertisers to transform the Internet into a medium whose true ambition is to track, influence and sell, in anever-ending cycle, their products and political ideas.  While Google, Facebook and other digital giants claim to strongly support a “democratic” Internet, their real goal is to use all the “screens”we use to empower a highly commercialized and corporatized digital media culture.

Last Thursday was widely viewed as a victory for “Internet Freedom” and a blow to a “corporatized” Internet as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) endorsed a historic public utility framework for Network Neutrality (NN). It took the intervention of President Obama last year, who called for “the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality,” to dramatically transform the FCC’s plans. Its chairman, Thomas Wheeler, a former cable and telecom lobbyist, had previously been ambivalent about endorsing strong utility-like regulations. But feeling the pressure, especially from the president, he became a “born again” NN champion, leading the agency to endorse “strong, sustainable rules to protect the Open Internet.”

But the next day, the Obama White House took another approach to Internet Freedom, handing the leading online companies, including Google, Facebook, and their Fortune-type advertising clients, a major political victory. The administration released its long-awaited “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights” legislation. The bill enables the most powerful corporations and their trade associations to greatly determine what American privacy rights will be. By giving further control over how data are gathered and used online, the administration basically ceded more clout to a corporate elite that will be able to effectively decide how the Internet and digital applications operate, today and in the near future. 

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/under-radar-big-media-internet-giants-get-massive-access-everything-about-you?akid=12858.1924881.K8Tx2G&rd=1&src=newsletter1032849&t=2

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1. Surprised. Not.