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Charter's Trials of NebuAd Halted
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Jun 25, 2008 01:52 PM
from the what-we-meant-was dept.
from the what-we-meant-was dept.
RalphTheWonderLlama writes "The trials of NebuAd by Charter Communications were halted after it gained the attention of Congressmen Ed Markey and Joe Barton. The online behavioral targeting system has been called "a 'man-in-the-middle attack' and various other unflattering names" but would certainly be an easy way for an ISP to cash in on client profiling."
PaisteUser points out MSNBC's coverage as well, according to which the ad-insertion scheme was dropped because of "concerns raised by customers."
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Senate Scrutinizes Privacy Issues of ISP User Tracking 109 comments
Hugh Pickens writes "As companies collect, use, and disseminate data regarding online users, there is concern that tracking individuals' Internet activity and gathering information from online users violates their expectations of privacy. The Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing Wednesday to look at the policy issues, and the hottest topic will be proposed systems by which ISPs can watch users and sell information about their surfing habits to advertising companies. The Center for Democracy and Technology has issued a report suggesting that these systems may violate federal law (PDF). 'Advertising per se is not the evil here,' says Leslie Harris from CDT. 'It's the collection of individuals' information, usually without their knowledge, always without their consent, creation of profiles and the complete inability of people to make choices about that.' On the other side NebuAd, the most active ad-targeting company, says its profiles are interest-based, and not personally identifiable. 'We have designed our entire company to make sure that we stay on the opt-out side of those laws and policies,' says NebuAd CEO Robert Dykes. Charter Communications announced last month that it would suspend a trial of NebuAd due to customer concerns about privacy."
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A Setback for ISP Web Tracking 32 comments
angelheaded tips a Wired story about the resignation of Bob Dykes, CEO of net eavesdropping firm NebuAd. NebuAd has encountered financial troubles lately as the privacy controversy surrounding the company's tracking methods has driven communications companies away. Over in the UK, Phorm responded to the NebuAd news by affirming that it is making progress with its advertising methods. From The Register:
"In response to the outcry over our revealing its two secret trials, BT said in April it would re-engineer the planned deployment so traffic to and from customers who do not want their web use profiled for marketing purposes would not come into contact with the Phorm system. The original blueprint meant that a opt-out cookie would tell the technology to simply ignore refuseniks' browsing as it passed through. It's thought the change has proved tricky. Phorm did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the alleged technical problems, but [BT's chief press officer Adam Liversage] said: 'We have been working on some things with Phorm.'"
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Customers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure what your point is.
Why would the investors be concerned? Because it would drive away customers. Same fucking thing.
Delayed != Halted (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article:
Charter has now agreed to delay any further rollout, though it won't abandon the plan entirely.
Elsewhere, I have read predictions that up to 10% of Internet traffic was going to be commercially monitored by the end of the year. It might be good for everybody to let friends and family know and to start making privacy-enhancement software easy to use and ubiquitous.
If people don't know about it, they're unlikely to raise a fuss and then we're all sunk.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll take a delay, and let the issued get aired, even if it is in Congress, who can't be trusted with those Internet Tubes.
Seriously-- Charter has no right, and it would take expensive and long term litigation to get them to stop it. I hope they learn, and others learn by the example, and that the sum is that it slows it all down.
Nonetheless, while I'd prefer that traffic payloads aren't analyzed, I fear they already are, in McLean Virginia.
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A PR meltdown would be juicy, but wouldn't stop them. An implementation delay is as good as it gets for now, in the absence of litigation. The data is just too valuable.... and there's little privacy legislation preventing its nefarious use.
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None of us were kidding ourselves to think we had privacy anyway, but fighting the good fight is still worth it. I would prefer that the current legislature do something, but it's filled with cowards, and not champions of the people that voted them in.
Another angle of attack (Score:3, Interesting)
When dealing with a company that is generally not responsive to customer feedback, the only thing that they're likely to pay much attention to is lost business. If subscribers cancel their accounts and tell them why they are canceling that may be noticed. Those who can't cut the cord with them completely (due to lack of competing options) might still be able to reduce the customer count by arranging for neighbors to share connections via WiFi etc.
If they are selling advertising and there is a way to tell
Re: (Score:2)
Nice try, but Charter DOES have the right. It's almost certainly in the terms of service that their customers agreed to when they signed up. If the customers didn't like the terms, they shouldn't have agreed to them.
If you want the companies to "learn", stop buying their services when you don't like the terms they put on it. No amount of lawsuits, legislation, and con
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I'm sorry, don't let pesky facts get in your way.
If people feel cheated, it's their own fault for agreeing to the terms they didn't really agree with.
In any case, it's a 5 minute phone call to cancel your service, so why waste everybody's tax money by getting congress involved?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The TOS that people sign don't abrogate their right to privacy, especially with other individuals with whom they communicate who are not party to the TOS in any way. The Charter TOS may in fact be illegal. IANAL, but deep inspection is a radical and unexpected step!
Charter, unlike say AT&T, is usually the sole provider in their own markets for cable, and so there is no competition; it's not a matter of hey-- let's go with TW, Cox, Comcast, etc. That's not the way cable plays, although an attempt to do t
Re: (Score:2)
That's unfortunate, but I don't see why it matters. If you're willing to sign over your privacy for internet access, then your privacy isn't that important to you. You still voluntarily agreed to the TOS. It's not like you'll die withou
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That's unfortunate, but I don't see why it matters. If you're willing to sign over your privacy for internet access, then your privacy isn't that important to you.
Or, y'know, some of us aren't interested in drawing false dichotomies between privacy and Internet access.
Congress isn't the right place to settle your local bullshit that 99.9% of the country doesn't care about.
Except for precedence. If Charter gets away with this kind of shit, then there's nothing stopping Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, et. al. from implementing the same system. We need a national precedent (in the form of a court ruling or legislation) set early on in this, and Congress is a perfectly valid place to pursue that.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not a false dichotomy. If Charter only sells internet access that violates the user's privacy, your only options for buying internet access from them are "Buy it" or "Don't buy it". Internet access without privacy violation isn't a product Charter sells. You shouldn't be able to take them to court and force them to sell something any more than I should be able to take you to court and force y
Re: (Score:2)
I'm well aware. Here are two solutions to the problem that are better than involving Congress:
Personally, I like the second option.
Unless you live in a very large city, the chances are good that a couple dozen
Possible to Block? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen plenty of coverage on this, but no technical details on how it would actually be implemented beyond there being a mysterious "box" at the ISP. Is it, or will it be, possible to block or restrict this device from tampering with traffic? Or are we pretty much at the mercy of the providers here?
Re:Possible to Block? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Your only hope would be to encrypt your traffic, which would raise a few flags if they are really watching you that closely.
Just fool them (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/ [nyu.edu]
Re:Possible to Block? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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I'm pretty sure that "opt-in" option wouldn't get exercised much, hence the opt-out requirement. Seriously, who chooses to be spied on?
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It isn't a "would be" implemented. It's already done. Basically, there is no way to prevent your ISP from altering your traffic, because everything that comes over the wire passes through them. You have no way of telling whether the ads served on a website are the ads that that website sold or whether the ISP inserted them without controlling both ends of the communication.
Dan Kaminsky developed a method to detect this kind of tampering , which at least can prevent ISPs from hiding the fact that they're d
Scurry under a rock (Score:5, Insightful)
I particularly like the little bit about how they will hold off on implementation while these important privacy concerns can be addressed.
Who wants to bet that addressing this means waiting under a rock until no one's looking and then going forward with substantially the same nonsense?
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Anyone remember TIA? That's basically what happened there, too.
Executives Need Advertisements Too (Score:2)
Privacy will only prevent people like us from advertising to the families of cable company executives. We need 24/7 surveillance of all their activities, where their children go to school, what their wives buy on-line and in grocery stores. We can analyze that data on an open public website. Send out google vans to record their every movement, and inundate them with your advertising messages. Roll out billboard trucks to park in front of their houses.
Fight fire with fire. Fight the RIAA laws with laws. Figh
Re: (Score:2)
I particularly like the little bit about how they will hold off on implementation while these important privacy concerns can be addressed.
Who wants to bet that addressing this means waiting under a rock until no one's looking and then going forward with substantially the same nonsense?
I agree, it will be a "wait until they forget" approach or "wait until we pay off enough people that no one can do anything regardless" instead.
Either way, if it should someone make it out, then the best way to fight back is to attack the wallet and make all the data collected "useless" in a sense.
This site uses a small script and the clients who visit with their web browser as a tool to visit junk, random, or non-existent sites so that they won't be able to collect any meaningful data. Get enough pe
Hundreds of angry customers vs. 2 Congressmen (Score:5, Insightful)
What awesome customer service!
Chip H.
Re:Hundreds of angry customers vs. 2 Congressmen (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
My parents have Charter internet and it basically works when it feels like it. But their other options are dial-up or satellite. Charter doesn't care about the customers because it doesn't have to.
I have charter internet, and actually it's pretty fucking awesome.
When I heard about Charter's disgusting NebuAds plan, I signed up for ATT's least expensive DSL plan - 768k for $20/mo, simultaneously with my Charter account. After a month I intend to choose one. My desire is to switch to ATT, first in order to
Paul Allen (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
From a high price of $16 a share in January 2002 to closing at $1.12 today, a loss of 93%! Not too far away from being just another Worldcom or Enron. Clearly this is a company that knows what it's doing, and means business!
Not just eavesdropping, but spoofing (Score:5, Interesting)
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The internet is a utility (Score:5, Insightful)
If ISPs are going to keep their de facto monopoly status, they should be prevented from doing anything buy carry data, by legal means if necessary.
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"I didn't try to download any child porn! Charter put it there!"
Let Charter, DHS, and pissed off moms battle it out - hopefully they'd annihilate each other.
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Choosing between cable, dsl, or satellite, or dial-up, and pretending this is competition is ridiculous.
This is like claiming only Ford cars can drive on the main roads in certain cities, and Toyotas must grow wings and fly instead.
Re: (Score:2)
In many areas the local government has granted specific companies exclusive rights to operate coax runs, that's a monopoly on cable internet service in that specific area, no other company can come in and offer cable internet service. The same is true of DSL, whoever owns the lines can jack up prices and neglect to upgrade their network, and they do.
The effect is that you don't have true competition, in any given area you have at most 2-3 competitors between classes of service, and its obviously not enough.
Re: (Score:2)
You turned this into a rant against open source in only a few posts. Nice.
First, most of the coax and copper rolled out was put in place a LONG time ago, and the costs for doing so have been recovered many times over by the owner. Second, there was a rule that phone companies had to at least lease the lines at fair prices to other providers, not free as you tried to slip in to the argument, but fair competitive prices so that the line owner was compensated while still allowing for competition. That is gone
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the places I've lived, there was only one choice for terrestrial high-speed connections. The only other "option" was something like IDSL, expensive and slower than high speed offerings. Satellite is an option for anyone that doesn't mind round trip times of 1 second that creep up to 3 seconds in high-usage time, often with really low c
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Also in order to use this you need a large antenna which has line of sight to the satellite. In some cases this might be physically impossible. In other cases landlords/local government may make the installation difficult.
All you need to know abut NebuAd (Score:5, Informative)
Tagging (Score:2)
BTW, who does the tags? Can one with mod points add tags or is it only cowboy editors named Neal?
legitimated? (Score:3, Funny)
Oh no... (Score:2)
Certainly [slashdot.org] not that [slashdot.org] Edward [slashdot.org] Markey! [slashdot.org]
Christopher Soghoian [dubfire.net] loves hearing the name Edward "barking rabid" Markey even more than I do. [google.com]
Re:Notes on Liberalism (Score:4, Insightful)
(sorry for feeding the trolls, I just couldn't quite pass this one by. I can't fathom how the term "liberal" can be so mangled in contemporary USA.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When the average of your population reads at a basic or below-basic level, it is quite fathomable indeed.
To quote the late great George Carlin, "half of them are even stupider!"
Re: (Score:2)
Crazy sex is so totally worth it, though.