Charter is going to spy on you for “enhanced online expierence” May 15th, 2008 at 11:33 am
I have never been a big fan of charter communications deplorable service but until now they had been just one of more than a handful of large companies that take my money and waste my time. This latest move is far beyond poor service and lack of customer support. It seems charter is making a move to spy on their costumers in order to increase revenues through targeted advertisements. I stumbled across this slashdot article. You can find more information here.
Charter is not the first ISP to play this game, a company named Phorm is already testing this technology in the UK. The implications of this type of data mining are wide.
Imagine every move you make on the internet not only being tracked but software anticipating what you might be looking for based on your history. The first and most obvious issue here is privacy. This has been compared to telephone companies listening to your conversations to decide what type of junk mail to send you.
A more realistic comparison equates this to listening to your phone conversation, going through your junk mail and pasting their own advertisements over the top. For example you go to visit a blog or a news article, charter will intercept that data and add their own over the top of what is being retrieved from the server. The internet is not only being monitored, and logged but also being manipulated before the content reaches you.
Not only does this become a privacy concern but it is also stepping on the toes of other advertising affiliates. The two biggest ways to discourage charter and other ISP’s from engaging in this activity is changing your ISP and lawsuits. For me personally I would love to see google lead the way to deter this type of behavior. With the majority of their income coming through targeted advertising they stand to lose allot.
In all honesty your ISP knows what web sites you visit already. When you put an address the request goes to your ISP’s DNS (domain name server) by default to route your request to the proper web page. If you have charter you have already seen this action if you misspell a domain name that doesn’t exist. Charter brings up their own not so helpful recommendations for your failed attempts. You can bet they make money off of this as well. You can bypass their DNS servers by setting going through OpenDNS
In the past I have not paid too much attention to the hype of traveling the internet anonymously. These types of “services” is causing me to think twice. Another project that makes it hard to track movements is the Tor Project. “Tor is a software project that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.[from the tor website]”
The above methods help keep your activities your own. Another easier step is to just block the ads as they come to your browser. If you use firefox (and you should) there is a simple plugin called Adblock that will stop adverts from being displayed.
Just another reason to be glad I canceled my cable subscription.