Your Web activity, logged and loaded
Found on CNet News on Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Charter Communications is planning to monitor its customers' Web surfing and then, anonymously, display relevant advertisements.
Schremp confirmed that Charter is using technology from Redwood City, Calif.-based NebuAd--which is reminiscent of how British broadband providers have been working with Phorm, which uses deep packet inspection with "anonymized ISP data to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time."
"The enhanced advertising solution does not utilize deep packet inspection. It looks at URL level information only. That's another point of misinformation on the Net."
Schremp wants to make customers accept a technology even he doesn't understand completely. If you want to know what URL someone is visiting, you have to take apart the sent packet and look at its content; that's Deep Packet Inspection. And since you do not know which packets contain URLs, you have to look into each and every packet. At this point, it would be trivial to look for other information too. It would also be interesting to know what the other side ion the browser thinks of that. Webmasters place ads on their sites to earn money and now an ISP replaces them, effectively stealing their cash. Or, even worse, ad-free sites are plastered with "targeted ads". If I want something, I'll look for it; and I sure won't buy anything just because a flashy animation is slapped at me.