Charter is proving the case of Net neutrality.

[the_ancient]

http://consumerist.com/5008801/chart...g-targeted-ads

Charter Communications is sending letters to its customers informing them of an "enhanced online experience" that involves Charter monitoring its users' searches and the websites they visit, and inserting targeted third-party ads based on their web activity. Charter, which serves nearly six million customers, is requiring users who want to keep their activity private to submit their personal information to Charter via an unencrypted form and download a privacy cookie that must be downloaded again each time a user clears his web cache or uses a different browser. More

This is just the start..........

[Pawel Kowalski]

Wow, that's absolutely insane.

[the_ancient]

My Biggest problem with this, it will enable them to Link to your competitors, how would jag feel if every time "hosting" is mentioned on their web site it links to one of their competitors? IMO that would be violating Trademark and Copyright Laws, using someelses work for your own profit it why we have copyright laws in the first place.

[Pawel Kowalski]

But are there any laws against this? There are plenty of programs out there that people install that do this anyway so I guess these idiots figured they could get away with it too.

I think there needs to be more competition in who can provide me with internet. Right now if I want to have fast cable I have to go with comcast. So comcast can do and charge whatever the hell they want and I have to swallow it. Luckily they haven't done anything that insane but it's just a matter of time before they find another way to screw me.

Net neutrality is a great concept that I hope our congress could take some time out of doing nothing to actually tackle but in the end if I still only have one option for high speed internet I will end up getting screwed one way or another.

[Ron]

This has nothing to do with net neutrality, which is about preventing backbones from giving different data streams different priorities (and charging for higher priorities.)

This has to do with an ISP using non-public info about their customers to provide them with [sarcasm on]a superior browsing experience and relevent advertisements [/sarcasm off]... an invasion of your privacy, sort of. Google does this and many other 'net advertisers do this, they give you ads based on their experience of your browsing habits. Charter just seems to be taking it one more step, since they've got you "at the source".

Geeeeesh, I remember when privacy advocates were screaming about cookies. Now GMail reads (errr- I'm sorry, "Electronically Scans") your emails and puts relevent ads next to them, and Charter wants to do the same for every interaction you have.... and nobody will do anything about it.

Enjoy your cookies.

[Pawel Kowalski]

I just don't really think this is much of a privacy issue as long as the information isn't stored anywhere. I don't see why they would store it, like you said google does this without storing any of your browsing habbits.

The issue I think is what right does a ISP have to modify content before it is delivered to you. And I think that should certainly be included in the net neutrality debate.

[jason]

I can't imagine something like this flying in the Rochester market, we have too many high speed (or at least medium-high speed) choices: RoadRunner (cable), DSL, ClearWire, a new county-wide (sort of...it is still growing) 802.11 wireless network run by the phone company, and of course all of the cell provider data plans. We already have speed wars going on between the cable company and the phone company (a very good thing considering that my cable connection has gone from 3 or 4Mbps to 10 over the years), I can imagine the next round of commercials..."Company X cares more about your privacy than Company Y."

Personally, I don't mind advertising if I am getting something for free or at a very low cost. For example, I know the 50 cents I pay for a newspaper can't support the paper on its own. Google is giving me GMail for free, so if they want to show me ads, that's fine too. What outrages me is when I pay good money to see advertising. Movie theaters are a prime example: every time I see a movie it seems the ticket price and the ads that I have to sit through before the movie starts both increase. The last movie I saw started 15 minutes after the time printed on the ($10) ticket. Prior to that I think I saw about 5 minutes of previews and 10 minutes of blatant advertising for everything from Pepsi products to the Cartoon Network. What happened to the days when you got to the movies early so you could watch the previews (which I realize are advertising, but I don't mind). Knowing that bandwidth is constantly getting cheaper while my cable Internet access fees are stable, I would also be outraged if my cable company started forcing me to see their ads on every page I visit.

--Jason

[Ron]

Hahahah Jason, when I first got cable, I was outraged that there were any ads on it, and especially the premium channels....

How quickly we get over our outrage when we find it to be "non intrusive"...

Enjoying your cookies?

[Spathiphyllum]

Two words: "firewall" and "filter"

That addresses part of the problem - the receiving end. I filter all of my content not for just security concerns but to reduce advertising that gets "custom" delivered. A chain of proxies handle the different data packets and sabotages the ad space the ISP hopes to deliver to my eyeballs. That is step one of undermining their economic stream via undesired advertising.

The other trick, i.e. cookies and tracking, is a bit trickier. Perhaps forging cookie data would work to compromise their collected data. Kind of like using a "nofollow" link in HTML to punish rogue site scrapers/robots that follow said link - a link that actually initiates a script and returns oodles of fake links. If the ISP collects junk, then their accumulated data, no matter how vast, becomes useless and discourages further use. I guess we'd need to see what cookie data is collected and how its key:value pairs are defined to infer what the developers are doing with it.

Anyway, there are ways to protect yourself from this tracking, but it's more than an inconvenience to really do something about it. There's an opportunity here for some enterprising security/privacy businesses to attack this trend and market it to the general public. I'll be curious to see who does this best and is willing to take on these behemoth telecommunication companies by effecting perceived money trees.

[thecoalman]

Just so it's clear as there seems to be some confusion, they'll be logging what sites you visit. No cookie needed. You can't block it unless you opt out which requires a opt-out cookie. You'll need a cookie for every user or web browser, if you delete your cookies you'll have to opt out again. They'll provide the information to Nebuad who will then serve ads from sites participating in their program matched to your surfing habits.

This same company however is also associated with inserting ads at the ISP level, the ad appear right in the page, there is no distiction between them and the ones that would normally be there. see here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/23...d-advertising/

What is really of a concern other than the the invasion of privacy is Nebuad itself, it's the same company associated Gator, GAIN and Claria corporation. You'd have to have lived in a bubble the last 10 years not to know about Gator.

[Spathiphyllum]

Just so it's clear as there seems to be some confusion, they'll be logging what sites you visit. No cookie needed. You can't block it unless you opt out which requires a opt-out cookie...

Interesting. And insidious. This is going to be a tough nut to crack. Even faking an opt out cookie will provide some tracking data.

[JPC-Greg]

It will be their demise when they start losing subs for it. btw, we are going to start scanning all your sites on our servers for data to serve 3rd party ads to give our hosting clients an "enhanced experience" . And so I can buy a fleet of yachts.

[thecoalman]

I can live with the data collection, I'm not a Charter customer... If I was I'd seriously be considering switching providers even if I had to go back to dial-up. I'd imagine if they can push this through other ISP's will follow. I'm no expert but I don't see how this could be blocked since it's being done on a ISP level.

In any event if they they attempt to start serving ads next to my content anyone coming from those ISP's will be getting a "You cannot view this site" with a big arrow pointing to the ad. I'm sure many other webmasters will be doing the same thing. If they want to serve ads to their customers that's fine by me, it's their right. I don't care if they serve a zillion of them as long as its distinctly separate from my content.

[Spathiphyllum]

...I don't see how this could be blocked since it's being done on a ISP level.

There are a number of good products, but the one I've settled on as being relatively cheap, user-friendly (for a loaded security/privacy firewall), and outrageously effective is:

IPCop with
1) Copfilter and
2) Snort

Get an older desktop with at least two NICs and 500MB to 1GB RAM and set it (IPCop Firewall box) up as your local domain router. Set it between your ISP modem and any switches/hubs on your local network. There are several add-ons, all open source, which can boost the features. A default install is outstanding. Adding the two add-ons I mentioned make this a superb security device. The Copfilter suite is a whole collection of tools that permits a good bit of customization and fine-tuning.

Really, a pretty easy to install and highly effective firewall+. Privoxy is the filtering proxy where you can write rules until the end of time to purge undesired code. It can be used as a standalone install on your local PC, but if your network has multiple nodes, it's easier to set up one Privoxy filtering service on the firewall and let it do the work. It's really at the Privoxy service where the undesirable ads are purged from markup languages. Default Privoxy settings get rid of extensive junk by default. It's always amazing to me when I disable the service to test a new rule to note the amount of undesirable content that I'm "missing."

[the_ancient]

This has nothing to do with net neutrality, which is about preventing backbones from giving different data streams different priorities (and charging for higher priorities.)

This has to do with an ISP using non-public info about their customers to provide them with [sarcasm on]a superior browsing experience and relevent advertisements [/sarcasm off]... an invasion of your privacy, sort of. Google does this and many other 'net advertisers do this, they give you ads based on their experience of your browsing habits. Charter just seems to be taking it one more step, since they've got you "at the source".

Geeeeesh, I remember when privacy advocates were screaming about cookies. Now GMail reads (errr- I'm sorry, "Electronically Scans") your emails and puts relevent ads next to them, and Charter wants to do the same for every interaction you have.... and nobody will do anything about it.

Enjoy your cookies.

Google ads and this are far differant, Google displays ads on a website they created They are not modify some elses content to include ads for them. even if the email, the email is not modified to include ads the ads are displayed next to....

Charter will be Internet ads in to other peoples content, that is where the line should be drawn,

ohh and BTW you might want to read everything about net neutrality, as this is part of it. the backbone is only a part of the beast... Some of which I disagree with, some I dont...