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Charter Is Latest ISP To Plan Wiretapping Via DPI

Posted by kdawson on from the bad-phorm dept.

Charter Communications has begun sending letters to its customers informing them that, in the name of an "enhanced user experience," it will begin spying on their traffic and inserting targeted ads. This sounds almost indistinguishable from what Phorm proposed doing in the UK. Lauren Weinstein issues a call to arms.

4 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Scummy ISPs by coats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does that mean that the ISP will be altering the copyrighted material sent by the websites?
    Damned right it does. There are no ads on my web pages, for example http://www.baronams.com/products/ioapi/

    Can someone tell me whether Charter is inserting any ads? If they are, I want to complain to the Attorney General and to my CongressCritters about felony copyright infringement.

    --
    "My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
  2. Now or Never by hyades1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Some things call for the proverbial nuclear response: boycotts, lawsuits, all-out opposition. This is one of them. Once one of these corporations gets away with this, it's game over for those of us who want a corner of our lives that doesn't have some lying prick forcing his way into it to sell us something, spin the information we get and otherwise screw with our reality in a way that works to somebody else's advantage at our expense.

    --
    I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
  3. Re:Call to arms? by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So if I blog something, and title it a 'call to arms', am I suddenly relevant too?
    No, you first have to include incendiary slashdot summaries like Company X to SPY on YOU!

    OK, let's cut out the middle man here, and go straight to what Charter is saying:

    How does this service actually work?
    It uses completely anonymous information and, based on your surfing and search activity on the Internet, it infers your interests in certain product or service categories, such as automobiles/sports cars, fashion/handbags, or travel/Europe, and so forth.

    Translated ... we're going to inspect the contents of your packets, and infer what you are looking at. Then we will use that information to increase our revenue by supposedly giving you more relevant ads.

    So, tell me, how exactly is reading my packets that much different from "spying" on me? I expect my phone carrier to not listen to my calls to decide what inserts they should put into my next bill, because telcos are supposed to have an arms length relationship with your data.

    This is not nearly as inflammatory and knee-jerk as you make it out to be. They actually are reading what you do.

    And, for the record, it can't be "completely anonymous" if they know to put it into my web-page. They may claim that they can't tie it to you, but, if they know to give you an ad for Depends Undergarments, at some point, they decided that you needed to receive that targeted ad.

    Cheers
    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  4. Re:Scummy ISPs by marnues · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I currently work for a cable company that is setting up this same kind of system. The only people that know what ads are being replaced are the people controlling the ad server, which is not the ISP. We (the ISP) are being paid to set up a black box that we will route ALL port 80 traffic through. Unless you opt out, which I'm not even sure will work properly. So the ad people can be doing all kinds of things with that data. Granted, they can't link the IP Address to a customer since they have no access to our provisioning server (and I'm pretty certain every last one of us Systems Engineers would quit before allowing that to happen). But they can be doing whatever they want with that traffic and we are none the wiser. Its such a black box, the ad company does all the monitoring on the black box. We are apparently the only company that even requested that we be allowed to monitor up/down and traffic status. The real problem is that we are setting up this extra router (it is another layer 3 hop) that also acts as a server and will delay any port 80 traffic. And we're pretty much allowing them full access to do as they will with the hostage packets. We're not checking. And if someone isn't happy with what their site looks like, we'll probably just route that one around the server, still pushing everything else through. I hope Google employees are checking their AdSense images to make sure that ads are actually from Google and that they are paying Google. As shady as this whole thing is, I expect that we will have legit ads removed, but leave the 'src' of the 'img' tag.