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posted by martyb on Thursday August 04 2016, @05:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-charge-for-bandwidth-consumed-by-ads dept.

Stuck with Comcast? You may get stuck some more!

Ars Technica , Gizmodo, ZDNet, and a host of others are reporting that Comcast claims that the FCC has no authority to limit or prohibit the internet provider from distributing web histories to advertisers.

From the Ars Technica article:

As the Federal Communications Commission debates new privacy rules for Internet service providers, Comcast has urged the commission to let ISPs offer different prices based on whether customers opt into systems that share their data and deliver personalized ads.

Comcast executives met with FCC officials last week, and "urged that the Commission allow business models offering discounts or other value to consumers in exchange for allowing ISPs to use their data," Comcast wrote in an ex parte filing that describes the meeting. (MediaPost covered the filing yesterday.)

AT&T is the biggest Internet provider offering such a plan. AT&T's "Internet Preferences" program reroutes customers' Web browsing to an in-house traffic scanning platform, analyzes the customers' search and browsing history, and then uses the results to deliver personalized ads to websites. With Internet Preferences enabled, AT&T customers can pay as little as $70 per month for 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home service, but those who don't opt into Internet Preferences must pay at least $29 a month extra.

[Continues...]

The Washington Post adds:

Consumer groups who oppose Comcast have said that Internet providers have a unique vantage point over everything an Internet user does online. For example, Netflix's intelligence about its users is largely limited to what customers do on its own platform, with little visibility into how those same people watch videos on Hulu or Amazon. (Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Internet providers, however, can detect when a subscriber visits all three sites.

Many analysts expect the FCC to finalize its privacy rules for Internet providers this year. But there are a lot of details to be hashed out, including whether Internet providers will be able to share subscriber data by default with marketers or whether they will be required to first obtain customers' explicit approval.

It's still unclear whether Comcast has actual, concrete plans to roll out a discount, data-driven Internet program. But what is clear is that the company has at least considered the possibility and wants looser rules for the industry that would permit such plans. A Comcast spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Gizmodo puts it succinctly: "Comcast has logged yet another tally in the competition for Shittiest Company In Existence."


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @05:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @05:58PM (#384141)

    I do use PIA all the time. They officially let you have 5 simultaneous links from different devices. In practice I put up about 10 different tunnels (with different end-points) all originating from my router and then each device behind my router gets a different tunnel. That makes it practically impossible to correlate my web browsing from my PC with my kid's browsing from her phone. I also switch end-points on a regular basis (my PC gets a new one every couple of hours).

    Unfortunately more and more services are implementing vpn "block lists" - not just netflix, but a few months ago bank of america started blocking me from logging into my account on their website if a I use a VPN end-point inside the US (PIA's got thousands of end-points all across the globe and I can still get in through a canadian end-point). Even worse though is that BoA and other sites do not tell you why you are blocked, you just get a generic error message at some point in the authentication process. So you might spend an hour shopping on a website, but when it comes time to check out then they fail you, but they don't tell you they failed you because they don't like your IP address, you just get something meaningless. Really fucking shitty customer experience.

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