Charter's Web monitoring draws intervention from Capitol Hill
Two prominent members of the U.S. Congress are asking Charter Communications to hold off on its plan to monitor its customers' Web browsing and deliver relevant advertisements.
In a letter to Charter chief executive Neil Smit, Reps. Ed Markey and Joe Barton say the monitoring plan may violate federal privacy laws and ask that the company "not move forward" until "we have an opportunity to discuss" it. Markey is the Democratic chairman of a House Internet subcommittee and Barton is the senior Republican on the House Energy and Commerce committee.
Charter did not immediately respond on Friday to our questions about whether it would delay its monitoring-and-advertising plans as a result of the letter. Although Markey and Barton have no legal authority to order a halt, they could make life difficult for Charter by convening hearings and lambasting the company for alleged privacy violations.
Charter is planning a trial of what it calls an "anonymized" ad-delivery system for its customers, who are able to opt-out by setting cookies. In an interview with us on Thursday, a Charter executive said hardware from NebuAd would be placed on the company's network and allowed to monitor what URLs its customers visited.
The letter from Markey and Barton says that federal law regulating cable TV providers--Charter is the third-largest in the United States--may restrict its ability to monitor customers' activities with the intent of serving up more relevant advertisements. In other words, they argue that an opt-in mechanism is necessary instead of an opt-out one.
That section of federal law, 47 USC 551, says: "A cable operator shall not use the cable system to collect personally identifiable information concerning any subscriber without the prior written or electronic consent of the subscriber concerned." Charter has sent notices to customers who may be affected once the trial period begins, but a mere notification (that may never be seen) may not amount to actual consent.
Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., says there's an even better argument that Charter would violate federal wiretapping laws because it wouldn't have obtained legally-valid consent from all customers. "I'm sure Charter will argue consent (was obtained)," Rotenberg said. "But I think they'll run into a very real problem in saying that people can grant consent to open-ended snooping on their communications when Congress has given broad privacy protections."
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
It's outrageous that Charter would try to re-label spying and altering of Internet traffic as an enhancement. I can't believe they would expect their customers to be anything but upset about it.
Chris
And finally, we use "Charter"... and their little DNS-redirect for bad IP-names (another of their, unwanted additional ad-revenue-driven "enhancements", which also uses "cookies")... It is a colossal PAIN (it plays havoc with normal surfing, on a wide variety of WEB-browsers... and simply cannot, actually, be turned-off). But, "Charter" has proven, time and again, that they simply do not care about customer complaints.
- by switcher75 July 9, 2008 11:26 AM PDT
- Senator Dorgan and his colleagues can rant all they wants about commercial wiretapping, meanwhile they plan to pass a bill today that gives Dubbya authority for warrant-less wiretapping.
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(11 Comments)They are all trying very trying to change the subject from their abject kowtowing to the administration