[NANOG] Charter Communications going to sniff traffic for advertising?

Wed May 14 20:49:49 UTC 2008

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 04:31:57PM -0400, Jake Matthews wrote:
> Apparently Charter is going to packetsniff its users and use that for 
> commercial purposes.

	I think you'd find they'd run pretty far afoul of 18 USC 2511
for that, without prior consent (18 USC 2511 2) (c)).

	I looked at that page, and as far as I can tell, they are just
referring to web ads, likely placed on their consumer portal site.

	Where do you get the notion that they are intercepting traffic?
Everything I see refers to a third party ad network, with no subscriber
data provided by charter.  i.e. a typical advertisers tracking 
cookie.

	Using another cookie to opt out of the first cookie isn't 
unusual, since it's the same mechanism that would be involved in the
first place.

	In any case, trying to correlate captured traffic to a 
cookie that would only be exposed in web traffic and to the site that
set it, would not be reliably possible.

	--msa