These telecom companies promise they won’t sell your browsing history

Comcast, AT&T and Verizon promised on Friday not to sell customers’ web browsing histories — even though a congressional resolution this week, soon to become law, would let them do just that.

“We did not do it before the FCC’s rules were adopted, and we have no plans to do so,” said Gerard Lewis, Comcast’s chief privacy officer.

AT&T and Verizon echoed the sentiment as they scrambled to calm customers rattled by the House’s revocation of broadband privacy rules that had been approved last October in the final weeks of the Obama administration.

The FCC-approved rules would have barred ISPs from collecting and selling the web data of their customers without their consent. The rules had yet to be enacted, however, before the House voted Tuesday to repeal them.

Consumer rights groups didn’t warm to ISP privacy promises that would be unenforced by legislation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation claimed in a statement that “big internet providers will be given new powers to harvest your personal information in extraordinarily creepy ways.”

US Telecom, a broadband trade group, countered in an Axios op-ed piece that browser histories are already being “sold to advertising networks — by virtually every site you visit on the internet.”

Next to Amazon, Facebook and Google, it said, ISPs are “bit players in the $83 billion digital ad market.”

House Republicans narrowly obtained the repeal on grounds the rules would have held ISPs to tougher privacy standards than those encountered by web companies.

Because the Senate had already voted for repeal, the privacy protections will disappear once President Trump acts on his commitment to sign the resolution.

“We had the same protections in place the day before the congressional resolution was passed, and we will have the same protections the day after” Trump signs it into law, AT&T senior EVP Bob Quinn wrote on the company’s public policy blog.

Verizon doesn’t sell personal web-browsing histories, either, according to a post on its website by chief privacy officer Karen Zacharia.

She did, however, acknowledge two initiatives using web browsing data: one that makes marketing to customers more personalized, and another that gives advertisers aggregate insights.