Printed Matters

There are two nasty, ignorant issues taking shape around how you use the Internet.

The New York Times Bits blog yesterday reported on the progress of two companies who want to install devices at your ISP to record everything you do. The idea is to build a profile around your computer’s IP address so that they can show you targeted advertising. They say this is actually less privacy-trampling than what Google or Yahoo are doing because they don’t store any actual log files about your searches and which web pages you’re viewing, they simply use that information to build out your profile and then throw the rest away.

I’m the last guy to want to come down hard on companies who are trying to figure out how to do advertising and make money on the Internet. These things have to be figured out, and soon, before the painful transition from print to web starts actually killing newspapers, for example. But, boys and girls, read my lips: spying on me not the way to do it.

We’ve always had contextual advertising. It’s a sensible thing to do. If I’m watching hockey on TV, then you can guess that I’m a guy and you should try to sell me beer and running shoes. If I’m watching a gardening show, makes sense to try to sell me gardening tools and contracting services.

Let’s be clear: what Phorm and NebuAd are doing is not contextual advertising. It’s an extremely invasive form of profiling with associated targeted advertising. If it is done here (they’re starting trials in Britain and the States), then it will be done without your consent and quite likely without your knowledge. There will not be, as far as I can tell, a way to opt out.

They say that they will never associate the profiles with anyone’s real name and address. That’s not comforting. As soon as the ISP gets a subpoena, there goes that promise and any promise like it. And unhackable? Such a thing does not exist.

They say that people – you and me, the hapless surfers – will like it because the ads we get served will be more relevant and useful to us. The counterexamples to THAT theory are mind-boggling.

• Say you are a problem gambler who has difficulty staying away from online poker sites. Do you need an ad for BigPokerNet?
• An example from the comments at the Bits blog: say you’re having marriage troubles and you’ve been looking for divorce help. Do you need your kids being bombarded with ads for divorce lawyers?
• Suppose you’ve been researching a digital camera purchase, and have gone ahead and made a purchase. What do you need with more camera ads?

A good analogy to something in the physical world: suppose the people at 407ETR decided they would use that transponder thingy they give you to track where you enter and exit their highway to track which stores you drive to. Then they flash up targeted advertising on billboards as you drive their highway.

No thanks, get out of my face! Jesus, I didn’t even remember parking in front of the gay porn shop that day!

This is an appalling invasion of privacy and the mere fact that ISPs are teaming up with this nonsense shows that they care not one bit about their users’ privacy. I’d suggest, if they really think people will want this enhanced service, that they trying making it opt-in and see how many people actually opt in. Personally, I can’t imagine saying, “Yeah, I really want better ads…sign me up to trade in my privacy for that!”

Now today, we learn that smaller ISPs who depend on Bell for upstream bandwidth are taking Bell Canada to court to make the telecom giant stop “shaping” the traffic it sells to them. Bell, and the other giant ISP Rogers, have been using techniques which throttle certain types of traffic, namely P2P and torrent traffic used to transfer large files.

Smaller ISPs are saying that when they buy wholesale traffic from Bell, they should be allowed to use it and shape it the way they want, not the way Bell wants. They say it interferes with their business if they sell a customer 5Mbs of download speed and the customer only gets 3Mbs when he’s downloading movies and music and other big files. And, seriously, when else are you going to notice it?

The reason people get high-speed is to download movies and music and other big files. If you just wanted to surf web pages, and you didn’t want to tie up your phone, you’d just get one of the Lite offerings. You’d rarely notice the difference. No, you get high speed specifically for the types of services the ISPs are now throttling – downloading big files at ripping high speed. And you PAY EXTRA for that.

It amounts to a form of censorship. The way this throttling is done is through port numbers. So, for example, they could let all the traffic on the ports usually reserved for HTTP (normal web traffic), FTP, e-mail, and a few select others come through unfettered, and choke down everything else. So, if I’m downloading a big disk image from RedHat over HTTP, I’m good, but if I do it over P2P, I’m bad.

Who are they to tell me how to use the bandwidth I’ve paid for? Why don’t we just run everything on port 80 then?

Now of course they can’t let the sub-ISPs have unthrottled bandwidth, because then everyone would flock to Bell’s competition so they can have an unthrottled, non-judgmental service. That wouldn’t be good, if the people buying wholesale from Bell actually gave a better service than Bell.

The whole affair appears to be forcing Bell to introduce a pay-for-use model, so you might have to pay extra if you go over a certain amount of usage each month. That’s just like the 407 people charging you for how far you drove your car on their highway. That makes sense. Rogers has already introduced their plan.

It sure doesn’t make sense to pay extra for higher bandwidth and then be throttled down when I want to use it.

ISPs can’t just arbitrarily invade my privacy and censor my Internet usage. I won’t have it!

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