Australian Telco Causes Minor Panic While Preparing Web Filter

Twisted64 writes "Australia's largest telco, Telstra, has been frightening users of its mobile data services for the last week. Logging revealed that HTTP requests from a mobile device on Telstra's network were duplicated with a request from another server, located in Chicago. Eyebrows were raised on the Whirlpool forums, with fears that Telstra was giving up Australian browsing data to a U.S. company and therefore the U.S. government. Following a well-worded letter, Telstra revealed today that the reason for this behavior is that the company is preparing an opt-in web filter. Personally, while the idea of my browsing data being logged anywhere does not fill me with joy, the idea of the U.S. government having access to it (randomized or not) is probably going to be enough to make me switch to an inferior carrier once my current plan ends."

Comments

Double requests

[kaunio]

These double requests also causes a lot of trouble for some people.

I'm working for a company running a web service for corporations and we have a very high level of logging and surveillance in order to provide a good service. However we get a lot of strange alerts from double requests from different ip numbers. It appears that some content filtering companies like to do the same (Bluecoat I'm looking at you) and they even do requests with cloned cookies (so they act in the same session as the user).

A lot of funky things happens if you assume that a user is only going to access certain (GET) links once but a filtering company is intercepting the request and sometimes manage to make the request faster than the user.

Re:Seriously?

[Cimexus]

This is not about 'internet restrictions'. This is to do with the fact that this represents a potential breach of the Privacy Act. Australia has fairly strong privacy regulations that govern how and when information can be sent overseas, and how people need to be notified of how their information is used, who can see it, what it can be used for etc. America OTOH is notorious for having probably the most lax privacy regulations/legislation in the developed world.

So yeah, in that respect, Australia's laws are "worse" (in that they are more strict with regards to protecting personal information). And we like it that way. Surreptitiously exporting information to a jurisdiction where similarly tough controls do not exist is not looked upon favourably.

Re:US Govt.?

[AliasMarlowe]

Personally, while the idea of my browsing data being logged anywhere does not fill me with joy, the idea of the U.S. government having access to it...

What leap of logic could possibly lead people to believe that just because the server is in the US that the US Feds have access to it, or even care?

One of the provisions of the Patriot Act gives the US government access to all data stored within the US on request. Essentially unlimited access can be granted in secret, and the request for access and the reasoning behind the request can be kept secret.