Which ISPs Are Spying On You?

firesquirt sends us an article from Wired about a survey they conducted to determine major ISPs' data retention and other privacy practices. Over a period of two months, four national ISPs would not give Wired the time of day; and another four answered some of their questions in a fashion not altogether reassuring.

Am I missing the point?

[Novotny]

If by spying, you mean conducting your communications via the interweb and invariably having copies of said communications either in deliberately or not deliberatley maintained logs... Its a bit like asking someone to tell your mate down the street 'it rains on Tuesdays' and then complaining when the intermediate seems to know your secret weather-forceasting tip.

IRC logs

[Tribbin]

Slightly offtopic, but ...

I seldom spend time on IRC.

Two weeks ago I was on #debian.

I asked the people if the conversations get logged.

Nobody present could tell me.

Is there a place when you can look up such things?

Re:ISP's fearful of RIAA/MPAA?

[element-o.p.]

There's a little more to it than that.

Most ISPs assign dynamic IP addresses to the majority of their customers. Where I used to work, we used RADIUS to provide dynamic IP addressing to our customers, and we would keep logs that would let us determine which customer had any given IP address on any given day and time. This data was used to help troubleshoot customer login problems, resolve billing disputes with customers, suspend and/or warn customers who had violated our terms and conditions of use, and yes, to fulfill subpoena requests.

However, we absolutely, positively refused to provide subscriber information without a court order of some kind, however. I would like to think that most ISPs operate to the same standards we did.

Re:That's true...

[turnip torrent]

Should we be more worried of ISPs spying on what we do... Or should the ISPs be worried about us spying on what they do?

Re:All of them, DUH - NO. Some do the right thing

[enselsharon]

Although not an ISP per se, my offsite backup provider publishes a warrant canary:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt [rsync.net]

In addition to a stated policy of "No data or meta-data concerning the behavior of our customers or filesystem contents will ever be divulged to any law enforcement agency without order served directly by a US court having jurisdiction. All such orders will be reported to our entire customer base."

You should read their philosophy page [rsync.net].

Re:you should read more closely ... the canary ...

[Eivind]

Sort of. But it's an interesting idea. The law *does* prevent them from stating that they've been raided, in certain situations anyway.

But does the same law have the power to force them to continue publishing signed lies ? That's what they'd be doing if they continued to claim that they have never been raided after they where indeed raided.

I don't know enough US-law to know the answer, but atleast it's not obvious that it wouldn't work.