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UK ISPs To Start Tracking Your Surfing To Serve You Ads

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the weak-anonymizers-and-other-fun-party-tricks dept.

TechDirt has an interesting article about a UK-based company that is trying to work with ISPs to make use of user surfing data to serve targeted ads. "Late last year, we heard about a company that was trying to work with ISPs to make use of that data themselves to insert their own ads based on your surfing history -- and now we've got the first report of some big ISPs moving into this realm. Over in the UK three big ISPs, BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media have announced plans to use your clickstream data to insert relevant ads as you surf through a new startup called Phorm."

5 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Re:hmm by NMagic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, most of your search pages already do logical banners. You search for something and they post up related products next to it. Hell, even most of your free webmail providers do it. As long as the ISP isn't dropping cookies on your box, I don't have too many problems with it... However, the one problem I see here comes when the ISPs start charging for bandwidth, and your browsing becomes as fast as using a 56k, due to the sheer amounts of tracking being done. Why should I have to pay for their ads?

  2. Re:hmm by corsec67 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wouldn't copyright law already cover that?

    You can't take a copy of my website, insert a little bit, and then serve that. Couldn't google sue any ISP that alters their pages in any way?

    --
    If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
  3. Re:hmm by STrinity · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Use tor... Sure, it is slower, but it bypasses the ISP tracking.
    However the last node in the chain can see anything you do that isn't using HTTPS/SSL, and if anything you do gives away your identity, they can figure out who you are.

    Oh, and some of them may be run by governments and criminal organizations.
    --
    Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
  4. Re:hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, I don't think so. Transparently altering data is permissible according to RFC 2616 (the HTTP specification) unless you include the Cache-Control: no-transform header, which virtually nobody has ever heard of. Thus, if intermediate alteration is part of the protocol you are using and you haven't availed yourself of the opportunity to deny that action, it can be argued that the permission is implicitly granted, just the same way it's implicitly granted that they can cache it at all.

  5. European privacy protection at its best by nguy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not only does your ISP record your surfing data and keeps it around to give to the police, he sells it to other companies, too.