Imagine if the postal service started offering discount shipping in
exchange for permission to scan every letter you receive and then target
you with junk mail based on the contents of your personal mail.
One of the largest telecommunications companies in America, AT&T,
is doing just that for customers of its super-fast gigabit broadband
service, which is rolling out in select cities. Though a few months ago,
it dropped the use of an undeletable “supercookie” that tracked subscribers’ web browsing activity, AT&T reportedly plans to track and monetize its broadband customers’ internet activity – “webpages you visit, the time you spend on each, the links or ads you see and follow, and the search terms you enter” – to deliver targeted “ads online, via email or through direct mail”.
The tracking and ad targeting associated with the gigabit service
cannot be avoided using browser privacy settings: as AT&T explained,
the program “works independently of your browser’s privacy settings
regarding cookies, do-not-track and private browsing.” In other words,
AT&T is performing deep packet inspection,
a controversial practice through which internet service providers, by
virtue of their privileged position, monitor all the internet traffic of
their subscribers and collect data on the content of those
communications.
read full article at TheGuardian
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