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

Jake Matthews jmatthews at cia.com
Wed May 14 21:19:26 UTC 2008


Majdi S. Abbas wrote:
> 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
>
>   
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20461817-HSI-Charter-to-monitor-surfing-insert-its-own-targeted-ads

Apparently, not just their portal.




More information about the NANOG mailing list