Do ISP's collect and analyze traffic of users?

Fri May 19 19:51:39 UTC 2023

On 5/19/23 6:09 AM, Justin Streiner wrote:
> 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.

Yeah, my curiosity was whether ISP were trying to get in the monetizing 
traffic analysis biz which seems to be a small degree but they can't 
really compete with the much finer grained information that other means 
can provide and that they have no particular expertise in it or an 
institutional desire. For things like Google and Facebook, that kind of 
analysis was part of their initial business plan.

Mike

>
> 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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