Charter Communications—my ISP unfortunately—is testing a plan that will monitor customers’ web surfing habits. The informaion will be sold to NebuAd, a sleazy spam company.
The cable company will sell the data to a firm called NebuAd, which in turn will use it to show ads to Web-surfing Charter customers that are meant to be related to their interests. (Visit a knitting site yesterday and see yarn ads today.)
Charter started sending letters out to several hundred thousand customers in four markets: Fort Worth, Tex.; San Luis Obispo, Calif.; Oxford, Mass.; and Newtown, Conn. (The letters were first reported by DSLreports.com.)
Charter said it will start testing the system within 30 days and will make a decision whether to introduce it to its 2.8 million Internet customers a few months after that.
Using data from Internet service providers for what the advertising people call behavioral targeting raises all kinds of questions about privacy, disclosure and who owns the information about where Internet users surf.
I called Charter to ask about this Tuesday, and the company quickly put Ted Schremp, its senior vice president for product management and strategy, on the phone. That immediately set Charter apart from the other Internet companies in the United States that have been identified as working with NebuAd: Embarq and Wide Open West. Neither of them would discuss the matter when I last asked.
Charter is taking “for the most part, a high road approach,” according to Mr. Schremp. “We have told customers exactly what we are doing,” he said. The letter to customers, he added, was “very forthcoming” and “not buried in mouse type and legal disclosures.”
The five-paragraph letter positioned the monitoring program as an “an enhanced online experience that is more customized to your interests and activities.”
"Enhanced online experience" my ass. There are several problem I see with this assuming they go beyond their test market.
1. You don't opt-in, you have to opt-out. I can tell you a thing or two about Charters "opt-out" because every year I have to opt-out of email spam from Charter as well as deny them permission to sell me email addy to third parties. There are a lot of hoops I have to jump through just to get this done, and then it has to be renewed all over again every year.
2. Once this gets into their main market I don't see them telling the rest of their customers that they are going to be sending them spam. I don't want Charter customers visiting any of my blogs or forums and ticked off at me because they see annoying ads on my page.
3. The experience I have had on forums and blogs displaying legitimate ads is that the big ad companies get high server load and slow down page loads. Not to mention muck up the bandwidth with high content ads and flash content.
4. Although the ads won't originate on my page, they are inserted into the data stream by Charter as if I put them there. With no legal background I still have to wonder about Charter or anyone else tampering with the data I send to my reader's browsers, few though they may be.
Well I don't intend to take the heat for ads that Charter places in the stream from this or any of my sites. A team at the University of Washington in Vancouver has developed
Web Integrity Checker. If you click the link the page will tell you if the stream has been tampered with on it's way to your browser. They have also developed a bit of code that administrators can put on their site to warn the reader as well as send the offending info to the administrators email. It's called a
Web Tripwire Toolkit. If you have a website and don't want your pages rewritten, I would highly recommend using it.
The Experiment Harness loads one page (launcher.fcgi) from each of the domains listed above into separate frames on this page. In each frame, launcher.fcgi runs an independent test to determine the integrity of a second page from the same domain (testpage.html).
Each distinct fetch of testpage.html uses a different top level domain (.edu, .com, .net, etc.), although each of our servers hosts identical content. Since the HTTP request includes the server name itself, any "party in the middle" which is only targeting a particular top level domain or group of domains will still interpret the request as something worth modifying.
To perform the test, the "integrity checking" code in launcher.fcgi requests a copy of testpage.html from the server, using a JavaScript XmlHttpRequest call. To your ISP, this request looks no different than if you had visited testpage.html in your web browser. To your browser, this request looks like pure data, so it will not be altered by page-modifying browser extensions. As a result, even if you have an ad-blocker browser extension that hides ads, our integrity checking code will still detect any ads inserted by your ISP.
The integrity checking code then compares the actual contents of the test page to a string containing the expected contents of the test page. If it detects a difference, it reports the modified web page to our server. It also displays a message to you saying that the web page has been changed, as shown in the screenshot below:
Charter is out to make a buck anyway they can, and rumor has it that they have operated at a loss last year and the first quarter this year. Their stock has been in the tank, and they almost got de-listed on the stock exchange. I may have to drop Charter and check out AT&T DSL.
