Comcast To Stop Tracking Users' Web Habits

jdavidb writes "According to this article, Comcast will no longer keep track of what its users view online." Good.

They aren't doing it to be nice!

[Mr.Intel]

From the article:

In response to the AP's coverage, Rep. Ed Markey, an aggressive privacy advocate in Congress, pressed Comcast President Brian Roberts in a letter Wednesday about the recording. Markey said the company's action could be in violation of federal law.

Sounds like they are just pre-empting a move by the FCC instead of acting benevolent.

Hmm...

[headchimp]

Wonder if (still?) they track people's usage of Newsgroups. Because let's face it, alot of warez and pr0n are exchanged that way.

Why doesn't this make me feel better?

[GSloop]

This is like riding down the road with Guido (sorry all italians) who says..."Ya know punk, I'm going to kill you." He pulls out his gun and gets ready to pull the trigger, when Guido sees a cop car pull along side. Guido promptly puts away his gun.

Do you:

A) Say, "Hey Guido is a great guy...see he didn't kill me. He must not be so bad after all.

B) Think Guido is a scumbag. He would have killed me if not for the threat of the cop. I don't think I'll continue to associate with Guido. In fact I think I'll just out of the truck right now...

If you picked A, please drink the Koolaid now.

Comcast and a whole host of other unethical companies don't give a hoot about you. Sure they might not rape you this week, but as soon as they can get away with it, they will.

With our Gvmt from, by and for Big business, these occurances are going to happen more often. And don't expect to see the cop that saved Guido. Gvmt doesn't have the funds to protect the little guy anymore.

Cheers!

Whats the benifit?

[pagercam2]

What do these companies hope to gain? All this market research stuff seems pretty worthless to me. These firms may watch where I surf, but the only real thing they want/need to know is where I'll spend my next purchase. I may surf porn all day and then buy music, I don't generally surf/purchase in any sort of direct proportion, and I suspect most people don't. I may do some research before buying a DVD player, but what I may look at and what I buy may or may not come from watching my surfing habits. So they get lots of information but does it really have any worth to a retailer???? Noticing that I frequent /. probably doesn't help sell anything. I am constantly amazed that people expect to make money off the internet, the internet has grown only becasue things are free or maybe cheaper than in the real world, people don't expect to have to pay for info on the web, and many only use the web to get info on store purchases, the prices may not be as good but having the item in my hand rather than waiting for Mr UPS is what matters!

Re:Whats the benifit?

[immanis]

Hey, noticing that you surf porn and /. all day does give them something to work with.

Now they can target-market you for sex toys and geek stuff instead of sports equipment. That must be why we get all those email messages about enlarging your johnson 4-6 inches.

Trend analysis is an old field. And like it or not, generalizations can be made about a person's web surfing habits. They won't always be right, but they frequently will be close. And they may only get you to make one purchase more a year than you would have otherwise. But that is more than nothing.

Worth the expense? Now that is the bigger question. For users like you or I? Prolly not. For average users?

Of course. How do you think these people keep jobs?

Security/Privacy audit

[lostboy2]

Hmmm... this may be off-topic, but...

At my first .com job, we were developing software that would, among other things, collect and store demographic info from its users (whatever the users entered in certain demographic fields in the software options/properties, IIRC).

However, our assertion was that the data we collected could not be used to trace use of the software back to an individual. That is, we were collecting data anonymously for its aggregate value, only.

In order to make this claim, we planned to subject ourselves to an audit of our security by some third-party company who, supposedly, was good and well-known for this kind of audit.

The audit was supposed to verify that the data was stored in such a way as to make it impossible to trace back to the end user, that the security of our data from external attack and also to ensure that our internal policies were adequate (e.g., that only appropriate employees had access to the data and/or the systems that stored that data, that only certain employees had the ability to grant other employees access, that strict policies were in place regarding the change of such priviledges, etc.).

In light of this, I often wonder when companies claim "we're only using personal information for $X" or "we're doing this to ensure the privacy of our customers"
*) do they really need to collect the personal info to do $X?
*) have they gone through an audit to verify that this private info is secure?
*) if not, why not?

Actually, because Me.jaded = True, I think I know the answers to these questions, but it still doesn't stop me from wondering.

Anyway, I'm glad Comcast will stop collecting this info, but it sounds like someone saying "I'm going to stop hitting you now. Aren't I wonderful?"

-- D.

Fastest speeds in a month

[PoiBoy]

I use Comcast for my internet access; and I live near Detroit, one of the cities mentioned where Comcast admitted to using their sniffing programs.

For the last several weeks I have been using the speed test on dslreports.com to monitor my cable modem because it had seemed very sluggish. My download speed was not over 400Kbps in the past two weeks.

I just checked my speed, and at 4:00 in the afternoon, I recorded a speed of 963Kbps, which I deem acceptable for this time of day based on past experience.

A sudden 140% increase in speed for no reason at all? I think not!

Doesn't AOL technically do the same thing?

[Yankovic]

First, we have no idea whether or not Comcast is technically doing bad things(tm) with our data or not. I'm glad they're not collecting it any more, but i never really cared in the first place. "You have no privacy... get over it."

Second, couldn't AOL technically be considered to do the exact same thing? Every web page you access on AOL is not direct but through AOL's proxies. That proxy is a store for pages and, though it's not necessarily tied to individual users, it certainly could be if they so desire. Is this what Comcast was doing? Or something similar?

I mean look at what AOL's proxies do. They:
a) Take a request from a user
b) Go out and gets that information
c) Hold a store of that information (so other users can access it in the future)

all you need is:
d) Store a record of who requested it

And you've got the exact same thing. And Comcast (claimed) that they never tied individual records to a single account... without the technical details on what each of them is doing, that's the same thing to me.

NPR Connection?

[handorf]

You know... I heard Bob Edwards mention this as one of the 30 second news bits on Morning Edition this morning.

Coincidince? Somehow I think not. It's outlets like that that bring news to the many users of Comcast who DON'T read slashdot and aren't geeks, but occasionally enjoy a little evil goat pr0n on the side. And they vote.

Re:Privacy, finally!

[Prong]

Pretty much every request is logged, its part of the business, get used to it.

Uh, connections to an ISP's network are logged, along with access to ISP owned services like mail servers. AFAIK, nobody is logging every connection to outside networks. If you can prove otherwise, I'd love to see it.

While we're on the subject, this sort of crap is exactly why I dislike being forced to use the servers provided by my ISP. As far as I'm concerned, I'm paying for a pipe. I'd rather have my bandwidth throttled than be forced to use proxy servers.