Q: “I want to get to privacy. One of your aides told me, you just want to scream when you think of this issue — and you deal with it on the Banking Committee. What is it that makes you want to scream?”McSally: “Look, I am not — I think I’m out of the ordinary here, where I, in a lot of ways — I deal with my friends and a lot of people.“I am a privacy hound, I just am. At heart, you know, this whole model that we have — businesses right now, they get to — whether it’s Facebook and others — their whole model is they collect your information, they sell it, they profit off it. And, again, if people are like “oh, if they aren’t doing anything with it” — that’s not the point.“You know, I’m not going to put location services on my phone. And no, I’m not going to give permission for that app. So I’m a little bit living in the dark ages, because I’m so hypersensitive to this issue.”
I just want to scream at the screen that she is lying, lying, lying. Perhaps it is just lack of self-awareness or a failure of memory, but McSally is anything but a champion of digital privacy.
She voted to strip consumers of the right to their privacy in 2017, allowing telcoms to sell your private internet history without your consent. McSally also notably took $5,500 from telecom corporate PACs in the same week of the 2017 vote.
Per FEC filings, McSally has, since 2015, raked in at least $83,500 in corporate PAC money from telecom companies.
Don’t be fooled, McSally has no interest in protecting your privacy online, even if she’s a fanatic about her own privacy. She doesn’t vote her values, she votes to the bottom line.