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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.
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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: 5, Informative) by Pino P on Thursday August 04 2016, @06:44PM
For one thing, not all sites use HTTPS yet. Nowadays, the most common excuse for not deploying HTTPS [pineight.com] is that a site relies on third-party resources not yet available through HTTPS, such as the caniuse.com API [github.com] or ad networks.
For another thing, the ISP can still see the full origin (scheme, host, and port) by inspecting the first packet or two. All supported major web browsers send the server name in plaintext in the Server Name Indication field of the ClientHello message. This way, the server knows which virtual host's certificate to use. The only browsers in more than negligible use that don't do this are Internet Explorer for Windows NT 5.1 "XP" and Android Browser for Android 2.3 "Gingerbread".
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Friday August 05 2016, @03:35AM
And even if everything is totally encrypted, they can still see what IP addresses you connect to, how often you do so, how much traffic gets sent, what time of day, etc. Also, if you use their DNS server, they'll know what sites you look up. So they may know precisely what you are doing, they'll have a pretty good idea how much shopping you do at Amazon, or how often you check Facebook, if you like to watch videos on Youtube, or if you like to use Google or Bing, whether you use Firefox or Chrome (based upon the servers those browsers ping to check for updates), and so on.