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UK ISPs To Start Tracking Your Surfing To Serve You Ads
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."
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
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.