Mere conduits have no memory —they wouldn't keep logs, let alone sell them to third parties.
If the ISP wants to "simply be a conduit", I can only applaud, as long as they follow the rules of common carriers they just implied by saying so: no snooping, no filtering, no selective throttling, no looking at TCP packets to look for a "25" (SMTP requests) and block them…
If they do that, they don't have to follow any privacy rule: they already respect mine.
I suppose a water "carrier" could have a sieve to filter away unwanted particles, or could add chlorine to kill bacteria, etc. But it certainly couldn't do anything equivalent to keeping or selling logs...
Well, they could drugtest your wastewater [0] and measure your water consumption with one of these "smart" meters at small intervals. It's not at the scale of data that an ISP could sift through, but with a little imagination, water can be a source of metadata...
If the ISP wants to "simply be a conduit", I can only applaud, as long as they follow the rules of common carriers they just implied by saying so: no snooping, no filtering, no selective throttling, no looking at TCP packets to look for a "25" (SMTP requests) and block them…
If they do that, they don't have to follow any privacy rule: they already respect mine.