ISP data collection from home routers

Giovane C. M. Moura giovane.moura at sidn.nl
Thu Mar 24 10:43:58 UTC 2022


Hello there,

Several years ago, a friend of mine was working for a large telco and 
his job was to detect which clients had the worst networking experience.

To do that, the telco had this hadoop cluster, where it collected _tons_ 
of data from home users routers, and his job was to use ML to tell the 
signal from the noise.

  I remember seeing a sample csv from this data, which contained 
_thousands_ of data fields (features) from each client.

I was _shocked_ by the amount of (meta)data they are able to pull from 
home routers. These even included your wifi network name _and_ password!
(it's been several years since then).

And home users are _completely_ unaware of this.

So my question to you folks is:

- What's the policy regulations on this? I don't remember the features 
(thousands) but I'm pretty sure you could some profiling with it.

- Is anyone aware of any public discussion on this? I have never seen it.

Thanks,

Giovane Moura


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