arstechnica.com — David Cancel, the CTO of the web market research firm Compete Incorporated, raised eyebrows at the Open Data 2007 Conference in New York when he revealed that many Internet service providers sell the clickstream data of their users. Clickstream data includes every web site visited by each user and in which order they were clicked.
Mar 16, 2007 View in Crawl 4
whackingdayMar 16, 2007
Egads.. no way? An ISP selling the data out of their logs? That's unpossible! And here I thought all of those ISPs were staffed with fairies and unicorns who happily delete all of that completely non-valuable information out of the immense regard they hold for your personal privacy.People need to get a grip. Very old news. Selling the data out of network logs has been happening since someone discovered that you could advertise on teh intarweb tubes.
hersheyskwertzMar 16, 2007
This account has been closed by the user
r00tus3rMar 16, 2007
I don't see why anyone would care as long as they aren't selling any information regarding the identity of the clickers.
humptydankMar 16, 2007
Actually, a generalized tool more suited to this type of situation is Tor ( <a class="user" href="http://tor.eff.org/">http://tor.eff.org/</a> ). Using it through stunnel encrypts your data past the ISP and gives you anonymity to the ultimate destination. Like freenet or other p2p systems it could really benefit from an "automatic" cooperative model. Tor is pretty slow because a lot of traffic is getting pushed through relatively few anon servers, and to help that problem you have to actually set up a server. If the Tor client would automatically act as client and server, then I think speeds would improve and there would be more widespread adoption.
stan57Mar 16, 2007
>Anyone noticed the spams they been getting from yahoo and hotmail contain parts of the names in your address book? I suspect someone is watching my clicks and other stuffs. *folding that Tin-Foil hat*<If your opening emails and not blocking images,then yes they do know you opened the email and verified your email address to them. Set it to block images,and only open the ones that you know.
mrsteveman1Mar 16, 2007
Its funny that people scoff at any mention of the government watching your online activities through your ISP, but no one has any problem believing that said ISP would sell that info to another company.
Closed AccountMar 17, 2007
"Anyone noticed the spams they been getting from yahoo and hotmail contain parts of the names in your address book? I suspect someone is watching my clicks and other stuffs. *folding that Tin-Foil hat*"Those parts of the names wouldn't happen to be in the email address would they? When your email address is bob.smith@hotmail.com, it's fairly easy to work out the users name.. It's a more valid explaination than Hotmail and Yahoo both deciding to start selling address-book contact-names..
Closed AccountMar 17, 2007
Are you sure it's the ISP doing it, not stuff on your computer? (I.e try another computer you know works fine on someone elses internet connection, or using a Linux Live-CD)Also, using OpenDNS [ <a class="user" href="http://www.opendns.org">http://www.opendns.org</a> ] will probably stop the behaviour, by not letting the ISP be able to screw with the DNS lookups
connaMar 17, 2007
You might not sell your customers out and that is good, but you buy your connection to the net from somwbody else. It is just a matter of tapping an upstream router.