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Comcast To Stop Tracking Users' Web Habits
jdavidb writes "According to this article, Comcast will no longer keep track of what its users view online." Good.
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That just means they are not reporting it to other people. You can be guaranteed the still mornitor it and use it internally.
Bastards!
Mike
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Comcast is just an ISP, and I don't understand why ISPs want to record that kind of information. For god sake, if you are an ISP, concentrate on providing good bandwidth and good customer services. Why stretching thin (like collecting user's surfing behavior) and pissing off your customers on all fronts? ISP can be a profitable business if you do it right, just like any other businesses anyways.
To speed performance, these proxy computers retain copies of the most-popular Web sites that customers visit.
We don't need that. Web surfers already have something like that on a personal, local level. It's called web cache.
This was an largely unnecessary step to "improve performance", and a lousy excuse to collect the data in the first place.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
Corporate sutpidity amazes me.
In a company that big, certainly someone should have been capable of raising a red flag on this.
And whoever it was that ignored the red flag had to know that people find these things out.
Odds are if ComCast had said, before they did anything, "the information will be stored only temporarily, will be purged automatically every few days and will never be connected to individual subscribers," and had the followed through on that promise, they could have avoided a huge PR hit.
Instead, they went beyond simple caching, and now everyone is asking the same question:
"If you weren't going to tie it back to the users, why were you recording user information in the first place?"
best web host ever
Joking aside, I think this touches on a key point. It's not whether they have the information, but what they choose to do with it.
I don't particularly care if an ISP is logging my every move, as long as they don't use this information to as an excuse to send me more uninteresting junk email than they do already. Which is odd really, because I would have thought they would be more likely to send me offers I am interested in if they know what sort of things interest me.
Let's face it - most advertising these days is rubbish. I almost never see an ad that tells me something I really wanted to know. Leaflets dropped through my door are never to sell something I actually want. I don't want a new patio, factory price clothing, etc. I do want to know where locally I can buy a universal 6V power supply with built in NiMH battery charger (for example).
I know advertising isn't the only issue. But my point is that I am not really bothered about what information is stored about me - only about how it is used. If it is used well, it could be to my benefit.
Comcast reassured customers Wednesday that the information had been stored only temporarily, was purged automatically every few days and "has never been connected to individual subscribers." But it said it will stop recording the information, anyway.
Funny how it doesn't say anything about not being transferred or duplicated. Of course, "individual subscribers" is not the same thing as "subscriber clusters" or "market groups"... what's the granularity they did use?
He said that while the company was recording details about customer Web browsing, it did not use the information to build profiles of online consumer behavior.
Of course not, there are other companys who do that for you!
"Comcast absolutely does not share personal information about our customers, and we have the utmost respect for our customers' privacy," Watson said.
He doesn't say that they don't sell it, or for that matter, what they do use it for.
Either way, the info they collected before they stopped was very likely sold, and it was worth a lot of money. This would be a handy trick to swap some PR for some quick cash if the need arose.
Well duh! A public company's only mandate is to generate as much profit as possible within the operating environment that they exist in. Do not make the mistake of giving any for-profit corporation the "benefit of the doubt" as you might a person. There is no doubt. The only thing that stops companies from stomping all over customer's privacy, health, and liberty are negative PR, and government regulation.
The reason why advertising is rubbish is because it's so cheap to do so. Sooner of later they'll find someone who WANTS that new patio or factory price clothing and sooner or later someone will send you a piece of spam telling you where to get that power supply. The industry of junk mail/spam works on fringe markets that arn't covered by mainstream advertising because the impact on the person is so much lesser. It's not quite nobody who wants these things but just a very few people(which add up). Rather than the sledgehammer approach of mainstream advertising which is intended to sway a large and attentive target audience, junk mail is like throwing a bunch of darts at a few selected consumers.
I stole this Sig
Yea, but if you've been involved with Guido for a long time and the service Guido offers is worth the risk, you gotta continue associating with Guido, just make sure you keep friendly with the cop too.
Yeah, but you'd better bail out when Guido gets friendly with the cop.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
But it won't be. And that's the problem.
Marketing, or so it's said, is the science of convincing someone to give you more money than you would otherwise be inclined to give in exchange for a given product or service.
No business in it's right mind would sell you a whatever (be it a universal power supply or a new patio) at the lowest possible price when they could sell you the same thing at that price plus a markup.
Marketing isn't about low prices; perhaps you were thinking of competition?
Marketing is about convincing you that you don't even need to consider the competition, because their prices must be higher, or because they must be less convenient, or because...well...because our product is for those who think young(tm).
There's a lot of meat here, and relates to the whole reason why Microsoft felt it had to control the browser back when it looked like the majority of marketing would be done on-line through the browser on the Internet, and why AOL felt obligated to buy Time Warner with the Internet looming as the next generation of TV...
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.