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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."
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday August 04 2016, @06:51PM
This is about protecting your privacy from commercial exploitation, not nation-state adversaries.
Ah, I see. Encryption compromises have moral judgments built in. Who knew?!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Thursday August 04 2016, @07:50PM
Care to share how you would go about it? I have the exact same worries with VPNs and would welcome alternative suggestions, or at least VPN suggestions that seem more trustworthy. When it comes down to it there is no way to verify a VPN, so you just have to trust someone.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @08:19PM
It's almost a total crapshoot. All you can know for certain is that your ISP is collecting your activity. Just need to research VPN's and find one that *might* actually be deleting all your traffic. Either way, all your eggs are still in one basket.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday August 04 2016, @09:26PM
If i was in a position to know how the NSA goes about this, I would be prosecuted for posting it.
So you will have to google a bit and find some reading material.
A generic discussion exists here https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/7525/nsa-decryption-vpns-update/ [bestvpn.com]
But its a tad short on details. Others poo poo the idea and give long technical arguments why it
can't be so: https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2014/12/29/dont-stop-using-ipsec-just-yet/ [nohats.ca]
Needless to say, the VPN company is in a position to inspect all traffic, and sell it on surreptitiously, perhaps unknowingly.
And the UPSTREAM of the VPN company Gets both sides of the traffic, encrypted incoming from the vpn clients, and possibly decrypted outgoing to the requested site.
Add to that the discussion the other day about binary blobs, and there is a lot to worry about and little to go on.
Question: Why has nobody decompiled a binary blob? Are they also encrypted?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @08:15PM
> Ah, I see. Encryption compromises have moral judgments built in. Who knew?!
Risk assessment is not a moral judgment.
Nation-state adversaries have the resources to compromise VPN providers. Drag-netting traffic for advertising purposes is not lucrative enough to justify the resources necessary to do the same. You might as well be arguing that no one should lock their front doors because the military has tanks.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday August 04 2016, @09:34PM
Nation-state adversaries have the resources to compromise VPN providers. Drag-netting traffic for advertising purposes is not lucrative enough to justify the resources necessary
A vulnerability, once in the wild, works equally well for both sides. This is why people arguing for backdoors for government because they personally "have nothing to hide" are so foolish and dangerous to have around.
You don't ALWAYS need a huge processing capability to crack some forms of encryption. All you need is access. And that gets easier once you can foist some malware over the wire into the user's internal network. Somebody has that router's internal interface bookmarked in their browser, and may have firefox remembering the password. There are a probably thousands of ways to do this, and most of them are plausibly deniable. Do some reading.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @10:49PM
> A vulnerability, once in the wild, works equally well for both sides.
Again, drag-net advertisers will not be breaking the law. The squeeze is not worth the juice.
Please graduate past your simplistic, black-and-white argumentation.