Board game magnate vows to buy & publish internet history of congress members

US Republican representatives’ decision to allow Internet Service Providers to sell customers’ private data has prompted one man to promise to buy and publish the internet history of everyone who voted for the bill.

Max Temkin, founder of Cards Against Humanity, has promised to personally purchase the browsing history of every member of Congress who voted for the bill, and publish the contents on the internet.

READ MORE: Internet privacy rules removed by Congress

The bill, S.J. Res. 34  reverses a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) privacy rule that required ISPs to seek customer permission before sharing browsing history. The rule also made providers inform customers if any of the data was breached by hackers.

The bill allows ISPs to sell private browsing data to marketers and others without informing internet users.

Some 215 Republican congressmen in the House of Representatives voted in favor of the bill on Wednesday, with 15 choosing to vote against it.

The House vote came after the Senate voted 50-48 to repeal the FCC rules last week. The bill will soon be sent to the White House to be signed into law by the president.

Since the bill has passed, Temkin promised he would go ahead with the plan, and warned people against crowdfunding pages claiming to be part of the move.

Another campaign has been started by privacy activist Adam McElhaney to raise money to buy congress members’ browsing history and has reached $156,977.

It isn’t clear how Temkin would go about purchasing each person’s browsing history, but he said “IP blocks of congressmen and congressional staffers are known.”

“If and when any data becomes available, myself and Cards Against Humanity will do whatever we can to acquire it and publish it. We have a long track record of activism and spending around government transparency issues,” he  wrote on Reddit.

“This may take a long time. We may have to file FOIA requests. We may have to buy browsing data for Congressional office building ZIP codes and then p-hack our way to statistical significance in an attempt to fish spurious correlations out of unreliable datasets, but we've done it before.”

Temkin reminded social media users that donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization that fights for net neutrality and privacy, is a more material way to make a difference. He said that Cards Against Humanity would match up to $10,000 of donations made to the EFF.