Behavioral Targeting Industry Standards
In this article posted at information week the author writes that
“Some of the largest ISPs in the United States have vowed not to monitor Internet users’ activities without permission.”
Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner may have said this which is good, but Google on the other hand
“Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has also indicated a willingness to allow consumers the choice to opt out of data collection.”
There is a big difference with letting people opt out of a service, and opt into a service. I guess the main thing is, nobody is going to OPT in for this, at least without incentives. But when you sign a contract with your ISP, this in effect would release them, giving your permission for them to monitor your activities. This isn’t a problem if it is easy to opt out, but the problem is many people do not even read contracts.
It brings up many questions, and the what they could do with this mined data just blows my mind.
What parts of the internet service would this affect? E-Mail, HTTP, HTTPS? How about other protocol usage such as bit torrent or FTP?
Powerhouses like Time Warner, Charter and Comcast could use this to tie in with other services such as television.
“Congress has been examining the issue and most ISPs prefer industry-wide standards over increased federal privacy laws. Several ISPs are working together to adopt self-regulatory guidelines. Although not all of those involved in drafting the guidelines have come forward, those who have said they hope to produce a code of conduct by next year.”
I don’t think that a code of conduct is not enough.
I have an opinion of another quote from the article:
“To put it simply, Deep Packet Inspection is the Internet equivalent of the postal service reading your mail,” she said. “They might be reading your mail for any number of reasons, but the fact remains that your mail is being read by the people whose job it is to deliver it.”
My opinion is that DPI is not the internet equivalent of the postal service reading your mail, it’s much worse. Imagine the post office reading and processing your mail. Correlating you and other consumers together into targeted marketing types. Breaching your privacy for use of financial gain. This would never have flown back in the good ole days so why is it ethical to do this now?
This is the first step, the next is wiretaps to phone providers to “monitor your activities for market research”
Article Here:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/privacy/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210604259&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_ALL
Add comment September 29th, 2008