AT&T, Comcast and Verizon explain that they don't sell your browser history

Now that Congress has passed a rule rolling back FCC regulations that would explicitly prevent internet service providers from selling data like your browsing history, three of the biggest ones are trying to reassure customers. AT&T, Verizon(which owns AOL, the parent company of Engadget) and Comcastall published posts today about the event, with varying levels of explanation about what their privacy policies are.

Comcast:

We do not sell our broadband customers' individual web browsing history. We did not do it before the FCC's rules were adopted, and we have no plans to do so.

Verizon:

Let's set the record straight. Verizon does not sell the personal web browsing history of our customers. We don't do it and that's the bottom line.

Those statements are true, however, if you read past the "commitment to privacy" headlines, you'll notice that both companies have other plans in place for selling customer data. Comcast uses "non-personally identifiable information" from internet and cable TV packages, while Verizon makes similar claims about its advertising policies.

What those posts leave out, is how that information, once shared, can become a part of what those companies' partners know about you. as a 60 Minutes report detailed in 2014, data brokers can specialize in taking that "non-PII" data and tying it back to a person based on what they know about their location and demographics. Now that you, the consumer, are frequently ingesting media on multiple platforms at a time, that information is becoming even more valuable. It's the kind of thing Vizio was trying to accomplish with its Inscape advertising program -- until the FTC punished it for automatically opting customers in without informing them well enough about what it was doing.

Engadget