Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation – Hearing on: Broadband Providers and Consumer Privacy, September 25, 2008
Testimony of Gigi B. Sohn, President, Public Knowledge: “Today’s hearing on consumer privacy comes in the wake of two high-profile online consumer privacy violations, both of which involved the use of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology on an Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) network. The first instance came to light in October 2007, when an Associated Press report revealed that Comcast was interfering with its customers’ BitTorrent traffic. The report confirmed earlier tests conducted by independent network researcher Robb Topolski, who found that Comcast was analyzing its users’ web traffic in order to determine the types of applications and protocols being used. The company then used a technique called “packet spoofing” to delay, degrade and in some cases, block traffic that was identified as being used for BitTorrent, a popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol…
The second instance surfaced in May 2008, when it was revealed that various regional ISPs had contracted with NebuAd, a company that provided highly targeted behavioral advertising solutions using DPI equipment. In test deployments of this technology, all of the traffic traveling over an ISP’s network was routed through a DPI appliance which collected data on specific users, including web sites visited, terms searched for and services and applications used. This data was then sent to NebuAd, which in turn, used the data to create detailed user profiles. These profiles were used to display highly targeted advertisements, which were dynamically displayed to the user as he or she surfed the Web.”
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.