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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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Good.
sulli
RTFJ.
Comcast Executive Vice President Dave Watson said Tuesday that the company was recording no more information about its customers than is common in the industry and no more than needed to optimize its network.
"How else are we going to keep our customers if we don't have blackmail material?"
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
From the article:
In response to the AP's coverage, Rep. Ed Markey, an aggressive privacy advocate in Congress, pressed Comcast President Brian Roberts in a letter Wednesday about the recording. Markey said the company's action could be in violation of federal law.
Sounds like they are just pre-empting a move by the FCC instead of acting benevolent.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
The Washington Post has this article about how Rep. Ed Markey is looking into Comcast's collection of personal internet usage info. Hey, this guy must read SlashDot!!
Markey, D-Mass., in a letter to Comcast President Brian Roberts, wrote that he was concerned about "the nature and extent of any transgressions of the law that may have resulted in consumer privacy being compromised."
Also, Comcast has a new press release in response to the fracas.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
What the story said:
Comcast said in a statement that it will stop storing the information "in order to completely reassure our customers that the privacy of their information is secure."
After using the MBA -> English translator on Babelfish, we get:
Oh shoot, you cought us, so we will pretend we care about you. HAHA, we will just find another way to treat y'all like cattle. BTW: Please don't sue me.
This is like riding down the road with Guido (sorry all italians) who says..."Ya know punk, I'm going to kill you." He pulls out his gun and gets ready to pull the trigger, when Guido sees a cop car pull along side. Guido promptly puts away his gun.
Do you:
A) Say, "Hey Guido is a great guy...see he didn't kill me. He must not be so bad after all.
B) Think Guido is a scumbag. He would have killed me if not for the threat of the cop. I don't think I'll continue to associate with Guido. In fact I think I'll just out of the truck right now...
If you picked A, please drink the Koolaid now.
Comcast and a whole host of other unethical companies don't give a hoot about you. Sure they might not rape you this week, but as soon as they can get away with it, they will.
With our Gvmt from, by and for Big business, these occurances are going to happen more often. And don't expect to see the cop that saved Guido. Gvmt doesn't have the funds to protect the little guy anymore.
Cheers!
In response to previous claims of Comcast intercepting packets, the company pledged today "to immediately stop recording the Web browsing activities of each of its 1 million high-speed Internet subscribers." This after the Associated Press announced on Tuesday that the company "has started recording the Web browsing activities of each of its 1 million high-speed Internet subscribers without notifying them of the change."
Big Kudos to the moderator (timothy) who was willing to take a chance on an anonymous bugtraq tip. I just got off the phone with Comcast tech support, and they said, essentially, that if this information had never leaked out, they would still be monitoring my internet usage.
Just looking at the original article right here, I was very suprised by all the "This is not news posts" that got modded +5.
Quite simply, this is news, and this is not a simple proxy server either, according to Comcast tech support. Slashdot took a big risk in posting this story, and I think everyone that hollered about the original story being a bust owes a big apology to timothy.
Anyways,
It's good Comcast has finally seen the light (or have had it thrust in their faces), but I am still looking for a new ISP. I think this image really explains why:
Curious jumps everywhere
High ping times
I'm afraid Comcast just isn't cutting it any more. Since my area is a Comcast monopoly, I tihnk its time that we pressured our public officials to break up this monopoly.
As I told the rep: "I hope you realize that if a competitor, ANY competitor, breaks up your cable monopoly here, you will lose all your market share."
And he said:
"Yeah, I know"
Did you bother reading the article? Comcast's position was that they were using the data to help them make performance related improvements. You're more than welcome to attack the validity of Comcast's statement, but you aren't doing that.
Instead, all you're saying, "Comcast should be doing X." after Comcast has already said, "We were doing Y as a means of doing X." That doesn't really further the discussion at all. A more valuable post might cover, "Here's why it's better to do X via a means other than Y." or "Here's why Y isn't necessary for doing X at all." or even "Here's why I think they're lying when they say their only motive is X."
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.
As if this hasn't been covered enough... But ISP's inherently track users. Pretty much every request is logged, its part of the business, get used to it. However, its not the tracking thats the problem, its what they do with it. If all that information does is sit in a log file until subpoena'd (or until the end of time, whichever comes first) then it does no harm. But ComCast was sharing (read: selling) the information to its valued associates. That's a big dirty no-no.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Hey, noticing that you surf porn and /. all day does give them something to work with.
Now they can target-market you for sex toys and geek stuff instead of sports equipment. That must be why we get all those email messages about enlarging your johnson 4-6 inches.
Trend analysis is an old field. And like it or not, generalizations can be made about a person's web surfing habits. They won't always be right, but they frequently will be close. And they may only get you to make one purchase more a year than you would have otherwise. But that is more than nothing.
Worth the expense? Now that is the bigger question. For users like you or I? Prolly not. For average users?
Of course. How do you think these people keep jobs?
best web host ever
Let's see how many companies want to gather your personal information:
...etc.
Comcast
Doubleclick
Real Networks
TiVo
Slashdot
Sourceforge
Amazon
Microsoft
Hmmm. Seems to me that the market is flooded with companies trying to sell consumer statistics. With all that competition, how do any of them expect to make any money?
Reminds me when banner ads were all the rage. Everyone assumed they would get a good return for their advertising dollar.
Hmmm... this may be off-topic, but...
.com job, we were developing software that would, among other things, collect and store demographic info from its users (whatever the users entered in certain demographic fields in the software options/properties, IIRC).
At my first
However, our assertion was that the data we collected could not be used to trace use of the software back to an individual. That is, we were collecting data anonymously for its aggregate value, only.
In order to make this claim, we planned to subject ourselves to an audit of our security by some third-party company who, supposedly, was good and well-known for this kind of audit.
The audit was supposed to verify that the data was stored in such a way as to make it impossible to trace back to the end user, that the security of our data from external attack and also to ensure that our internal policies were adequate (e.g., that only appropriate employees had access to the data and/or the systems that stored that data, that only certain employees had the ability to grant other employees access, that strict policies were in place regarding the change of such priviledges, etc.).
In light of this, I often wonder when companies claim "we're only using personal information for $X" or "we're doing this to ensure the privacy of our customers"
*) do they really need to collect the personal info to do $X?
*) have they gone through an audit to verify that this private info is secure?
*) if not, why not?
Actually, because Me.jaded = True, I think I know the answers to these questions, but it still doesn't stop me from wondering.
Anyway, I'm glad Comcast will stop collecting this info, but it sounds like someone saying "I'm going to stop hitting you now. Aren't I wonderful?"
-- D.
We don't need that. Web surfers already have something like that on a personal, local level. It's called web cache.
One of the benefits of going through a caching proxy is that the cache is centralized, and available to everybody. This can amount to a huge upstream bandwidth savings for an ISP.
If ten customers go directly to CNN.com, the ISP will download CNN.com from its upstream provider ten times--the fact that customer A visits the site doesn't help customer B, since their browser caches are private. For that matter, if customer A switches between Netscape and IE, he will have to download the page again, since each browser maintains its own independent cache.
With ten customers going through a transparent caching proxy, the ISP caches the page once, and serves it from the cache ten times. This is a huge savings on upstream bandwidth, and improves performance for everybody. CNN.com sees less load on their server, visitors load the CNN website faster, and customers visiting MSNBC.com have more upstream bandwidth available.
For the last several weeks I have been using the speed test on dslreports.com to monitor my cable modem because it had seemed very sluggish. My download speed was not over 400Kbps in the past two weeks.
I just checked my speed, and at 4:00 in the afternoon, I recorded a speed of 963Kbps, which I deem acceptable for this time of day based on past experience.
A sudden 140% increase in speed for no reason at all? I think not!
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
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
You know... I heard Bob Edwards mention this as one of the 30 second news bits on Morning Edition this morning.
Coincidince? Somehow I think not. It's outlets like that that bring news to the many users of Comcast who DON'T read slashdot and aren't geeks, but occasionally enjoy a little evil goat pr0n on the side. And they vote.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Unfortunately "anonymizers" aren't too anonymouse these days...
, 00 .html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50371
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!