Do ISP's collect and analyze traffic of users?

Fri May 19 13:09:02 UTC 2023

Hank:

No doubt there is a massive amount of information that can be gathered from
in-box telemetry.  This thread appears to be more focused on providers
gathering data from traffic in flight across their infrastructure.

Thank you
jms

On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 8:49 AM Hank Nussbacher <hank at efes.iucc.ac.il>
wrote:

> On 19/05/2023 15:27, Justin Streiner wrote:
>
> It amazes me how people can focus on Netflow metadata and ignore things
> like Microsoft telemetry data from every Windows box, or ignore the
> massive amount of html cookies that are traded by companies or how
> almost every corporate firewall or anti-spam box "reports" back to the
> mother ship and sends tons of information via secret channels like
> hashed DNS lookups just to be avoided.
>
> Regards,
> Hank
>
> > There are already so many different ways that organizations can find
> > out all sorts of information about individual users, as others have
> > noted (social media interactions, mobile location/GPS data, call/text
> > history, interactions with specific sites, etc), that there probably
> > isn't much incentive for many providers to harvest data beyond what is
> > needed for troubleshooting and capacity planning.  Plus, gathering
> > more data - potentially down to the level packet payload - is not an
> > easy problem to solve (read: expensive) and doesn't scale well at all.
> > 100G links are very common today, and 400G is becoming so.  I doubt
> > that many infrastructure providers would be able to justify the major
> > investments in extra infrastructure to support this, for a revenue
> > stream that likely wouldn't match that investment, which would make
> > such an investment a loss-leader.
> >
> > Content providers - particularly social media platforms - have a
> > somewhat different business model, but those providers already have
> > many different ways to harvest and sell large troves of user data.
> >
> > Thank you
> > jms
>
>
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