Comments on: Q&A with Charter VP: Your Web activity, logged and loaded

Charter exec Ted Schremp talks about the ISP's plan to "model" your online interests for ad purposes and also protect your privacy.

[Save_Me_from_my_Govt]

What part of "I don't WANT my web-surfing monitored and my 'experience' modeled" do these clowns not understand???

I'm going to block their ads anyway, and if they continue to "monitor" and "model", I'd use another vendor.

[umbrae]

Thank you Cnet. I will never get services from Charter Communications now. Any sort of Deep Packet inspection data mining is bad news. They should be ashamed of themselves.

[RobertAPierce]

This is absolutely crazy, anyone who is a charter customer should either drop their service immediately or (if they don't have a valid alternative) complain to let charter know you don't want them snooping on all your traffic. Suffice it to say that I would never consider a charter customer as long as this program is in place.......

[JRude667]

I'm not market driven. I pay almost NO attention to ads...especially the jittering obnoxious

high CPU ones! There IS such a thing as bad publicity! I know what I'm looking for when I

search and will target my OWN sites and products! Ads for sites I frequent are a necessary

evil for paying the freight. I do not need ''targeted'' ads for ANY reason. I do not need

another entity snooping on what I do! How long til NSA hooks into all the Packet Inspection

hardware...they already ARE!? What a blow for privacy and Freedom.

[JRude667]

I'm not market driven. I pay almost NO attention to ads...especially the jittering obnoxious

high CPU ones! There IS such a thing as bad publicity! I know what I'm looking for when I

search and will target my OWN sites and products! Ads for sites I frequent are a necessary

evil for paying the freight. I do not need ''targeted'' ads for ANY reason. I do not need

another entity snooping on what I do! How long til NSA hooks into all the Packet Inspection

hardware...they already ARE!? What a blow for privacy and Freedom.

[Earl Benzar]

Excellent questions.

There is no way in hell I want my ISP monitoring my web surfing. What part of "invasion of privacy" does this clown not understand?

[jake_n]

Don't forget FiOS is moving accross the country and may be near you soon. The heck with these guys tracking us. of course Verizon may have the same idea. Using firefox which dumps your cookies every time you close it would also help

[zeroplane]

Ok so what is going to stop me from:
a) Paying a 3rd party to provide a 256-bit encrypted proxy over port 80 for all of my requests.
b) Using vendors that provide encrypted connections nntp/pop3/SSL
c) Using the free anon-network

and also dumping all cookies on browser close may help. But these guys are tracking your movement by your account/IP address through their routers.. they don't just use cookies.

[scoosdad]

I'm a Charter customer in one of the affected markets, and two things were not addressed in this article/interview:

1. Why, when setting the cookie to opt-out, did Charter require us to fill in our name, address, account number, email address, etc. on a web form? Once for every browser, in each PC or laptop. Why on earth was all that information needed in order for the cookie to be set?

2. Does Charter (and its customer) realize that the cookie is only good for 12 months? According to my cookie file, the cookie that was set by connect.charter.com (cookie name "knanpro") expires exactly one year from the day it was set. Great opt-out, Charter. In a year we're all going to be seeing the ads again (if we're still subscribing).

The letter that was sent to us made it all sound so beneficial to me, like it was almost something I'd pay more money to get: "an enhanced online experience".... "innovative new technology". Charter, I'd actually pay for innovative new technology if it helped me more than it helped you. That letter did absolutely nothing but cover their legal butts. I laughed out loud when I read the BS in it. It's posted in its entirety on dslreports, go read it for a chuckle. "Focus group", bah. "Yes please, I want to see your targeted ads, it sounds great to me!"

I'm lucky to have other options, and I'm one long-time Charter customer who intends to follow through with my threat to cancel my Charter internet, phone, and HD cable TV if they don't back off on this plan. This CNET article did nothing to reassure me. Someone needs to ask them again, this time with some tougher questions than these softballs.

[loserguy3000]

"We view it the same way as offering faster Internet speeds. This is no different." And thus the dance continues. I could barely make it through the interview...if you could even call it that. Seldom have I ever felt to dirty in watching a company spin a destructive and potentially illegal activity towards it customers.

This is data collection and dissemination. This is clearly nothing more than a dominant communications company leveraging their customer base to increase profitability in the what should be the most secure of environments - their privacy. Stating that certain areas would be off-limit (sexual, medical) implies filtering, which further implies data-mining.

The question here isn't technical, but lawful and intrusive. When the company states that collecting data and using that to modify the browsing experience based on paths well traveled, this clearly implies a degradation in overall service parallel with Pay TV vs. standard cable, with sprinkles of invasive behavior thrown in for good measure.

As the interviewee stated, there's nothing new or fundamentally wrong with allowing a company to inspect and display advertising based on targeted key-words or the like, but this usually comes at the expense of the company offering (namely free) service. Suspecting a paying client base to not only pay full price for the pleasure of inviting increased marketing into their homes - and then making them swallow the idea its a service UPGRADE (again "We view it the same way as offering faster Internet speeds. This is no different") is beyond despicable and atrocious. It borders on criminal.

I would encourage each and every Charter member to abandon ship pronto, to seek their internet provider elsewhere. You may pay more and experience slower speeds, but please respect companies that respect your patronage, and not squeeze you further under the assumption they're doing you a favor. Absolutely shameful.

[jkaufman101]

What a lame interview. No wonder CNET's on the ropes.

Answer to the clowns at Charter: adblockPLUS.

[carborundum]

No surprise from a company with no "customers." According to their own corporate-speak, they have RGUs: Revenue Generating Units. So stop whining and send in your money ...

Why oh why did we ever let those people get their hands on the web?

[AppleSuxLeo]

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[drfrost]

"This is clearly nothing more than a dominant communications company leveraging their customer base to increase profitability in the what should be the most secure of environments - their privacy."

Quoted for truth. There's really nothing more to say.

[AnnaThib]

Dealt with most of them - Comcast, Bellsouth (now AT&T) and now Cox - and they all data mine like crazy according to my firewall, which also lets me backtrace them. They're Big Brother (ck out rumors about AT&T's supposed mega computer in San Fran spying on e-mails). Use all security possible, but they're getting nasty about getting their way. They spy bigtime (ex. Comcast choking speed on big downloaders - despite denials, how do they know who these people are, right?) . I joined millions who protested FCC deregulation to avoid monopolies and they ignored us as usual. I assure you they're getting more than just market data. This is a real problem. You have to deal with them because there aren't many service providers, which they situated. Could we appeal to Congress to protect our privacy specifically from them?

[George Orwellian]

Declan,

You cleared up some important details, such as that web page ads won't be replaced, they will be served by the regular advertising network.

But you didn't pin down how they will not track access by children, how they will avoid medical tracking... is the latter actually in a contract that Charter subscribers can view? (No)

As for Shremp's stmt "The way the system works is that it tracks URL information, again in an anonymous way.", well, he said they will deliver targeted ads to each household machine. First, that's pseudo-anonymous. Ask exactly what information allows that to happen.

What happens if web surfing is done with cookies disabled? How are advertisers tracking a particular box (browser instance across machines) in a particular household? How do they even tell which person among multiple on one machine is that person if cookies are disabled, even if they login as different lusers? You know that information is not part of the HHTP stream. They are claiming to be able to discriminate that, right?

Charter's own web page states all sorts of reasons that may cause someone to lose their opt-out cookie, and that the luser must opt-out again and again and again as might be necessary. How does that qualify for the known definition of opt-out?

Declan, you're a security geek. You know that cookies should be wiped at some frequency for privacy reasons...why didn't you ask about it?

Ask Shremp whether it is technically possible (it is) for an entire household to opt-out without the need for a cookie, and why that is not offered.

Ask why boo-boo er Nebu won't up and decide to read mail traffic to see for example what SIGs (special interest groups) an account might be subscribed to, such as car or sports mailing lists, and then add this information to the web surfing being targeted. (How does Google make money off of POP delivery?)

Can this device conveniently be used as a government snooping device with an appropriate module add-on? What do the snoop devices look like on the diagram of one of Charter's networks (covering many subscribers)? I would imagine an ISP has many lines into and out of it. It's easier for me to picture redundant backbone connections, but what does the network topology look like incoming? Concentrators?

Ask Shremp for more answers.

I now proxy all my web/ftp connections via ssh proxy (check my IP, I'm coming at you from Sweden!), and will probably add mail soon too. Do your part and explain how this works...think Panix.com and Privoxy.

Hey, even Privoxy used just locally can bust a ton of ads. I guess that's why it used to be called AdBuster.

--
Harvey Mars

[krinsh]

I guess I'll be forced to do any product research and what little online shopping (for bodybuilding supplements) at work and stick to porn and MMOGs at home so all my URLs are filtered for their 'sexual' nature. I can't believe the malicious, unmitigated gall of a communications utility - not even a media provider but a communications utility - considering something that puts more money in their pockets at the expense of my privacy an 'ehancement'.

[driven01]

I am moving into a Charter area. I have a choice between AT&T (DSL) and Charter. I was going to go with Charter because the price is comparable (even with the "required" phone line that I'll never use with DSL) ... and the fact that Charter is double the speed of DSL ... but after reading this article there is NO WAY on God's green earth that I'm going to patronize them. They really need to get a clue.

I'm not an RGU, I'm a customer. Until they start realizing that then they can go to heck. I wasn't going to use them for TV either. I have DirecTV for that. (and have been VERY happy with them.)

[AppleSuxLeo]

Moe , Larry , and Schremp !