From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone is away this week.

I'm Bob Garfield.

The first hundred days of the Trump administration have been something like the White House Bowling Alley.

The Obama administration hurled regulations aimed at protecting the public, and now, almost

automatically, in the name of undoing executive overreach, they're rolling right back.

The White House was even undertaken to permit no new regulations unless two older ones are erased from the books.

The latest rollback concerns online privacy. After a vote in the House on Tuesday, the

president's signature will reverse rules that later this year would have governed user data.

Namely, they would have required internet service providers to ask permission if they

wanted to track your information, information including your browsing history, your location,

even your app use. It means your entire digital footprint, any medical questions you might

look for answers to online. Online searches, even your private emails could be sold to third parties.

Users were given the right to privacy so that their data could not be sold without their

permission to advertisers and others by broadband providers. But under the new rules, your ISP,

Comcast, Verizon, Cox, AT&T, whomever, can freely sell your data.

This week's vote was done under the Congressional Review Act, an obscure and rarely used way,

to undo agency regulations passed during the waning months of a previous administration.

And here's the twist. Under the law, once a new rule is revoked, that agency cannot ever make it or anything

similar to it again.

Right now, there is essentially no federal regulator for how this data will be handled by

ISPs.

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