I'd love to have fiber dropped to my home but this article glosses over the privacy implications of having a government entity have direct access to everything you do online.
"There Are Good Reasons Not to Want the Government to be Your ISP
"Just because a local municipality might own the fiber infrastructure does not necessarily mean it is also best-suited to act as an ISP to residents. Residents might rightly wonder what sort of information sharing practices would become policy, particularly information sharing with law enforcement.
"This challenge can be addressed as well. Cities can help resolve privacy concerns by adopting the open access model described above. On this model the local municipality merely leases the fiber and never has to have access to the data on the fiber. Local ISPs that lease the fiber can be held accountable by users that encourage the ISPs to adopt privacy-protecting policies and terms of service."
Indeed. Taxpayer-funded broadband has its allure, but the risks of something going very wrong with private data are much higher, in terms of what is at stake if not in terms of odds of a breach.
The solution here is SSL everywhere, at all times. We should be just as concerned about Time Warner and Comcast having access to our private browsing.
It'd be nice to have an intermediate step between HTTP and CA-validated HTTPS. Yes, my ISP could theoretically MITM me, but it'd at least allow websites to prevent casual snooping.
