I drafted a post today for InternetEvolution that they edited.
Say you’re walking down the sidewalk having a talk with your best friend about all kinds of things. What if you found out later that the sidewalk you were using wasn’t really a sidewalk – but instead a kind of false-front giant copying machine, unobstrusively vacuuming up what you were saying and adding to its database of information about you? Or, say you send a letter to a client of yours (to the extent you still do this), and it turns out later that your letter was intercepted, steamed open, and the contents were read. Or, say you are having a telephone conversation with someone named Peter Brown and it turns out later that the voice you heard on the other end of the line wasn’t Peter Brown at all but instead some sounds aimed at convincing you that Peter Brown was still on the line.
All of these hypothetical situations have certain key elements in common: you’re communicating, and some intermediary that you thought was mutely, helpfully standing by to assist (the sidewalk, the postal system, the telephone line provider) turns out to have something else in mind. That intermediary may want to copy your datastream so it can target ads or different levels of pricing at you, or it may want to inject information into the datastream you’re seeing or hearing for its own purposes (that’s the phone example, analogous to what Comcast was caught doing late last year).
The ongoing flap about Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) has been triggered by just this kind of activity (or planned activity) by ISPs. . . .
The rest of the short post is here.
As I recall, people once had exactly the same concerns about Gmail. Afterall, technically Google “steams open” every electronic letter you send and “reads” it to serve you with targeted advertisements. After much noise (and even an anti-Gmail bill here in California), it turns out that people weren’t really that concerned.
The same will likely be true with DPI–a computer that passively picks out keywords and serves ads is not the same as an NSA agent monitoring your communications. As a case in point–the only way you are able to drum up concern is to personify these computers (“seeing or hearing for its own purposes”) to make it sound as if there is an evil genius behind the scenes monitoring your every move.
From a privacy standpoint, there is little difference between Google and NebuAd.
The difference between Gmail and ISP use of these techniques is that you can choose not to use Gmail. The market for internet access is much more concentrated.
Also, from my perspective there is a huge difference between conduit and application. The fact that the comment munges them together is itself an indication of what an enormous perception problem we have – the carriers have effectively “disappeared” the notion of common carriage. A big mistake, and one I hope we’ll correct next year.
Also there’s the minor detail that in Comcast’s case anyway, “Deep Packet INSPECTION” is a euphemism for “Deep Packet Manipulation.” Imagine Google altering your email in transit so you receive messages as from one of your correspondents but actually never sent by that party, just created out of whole cloth and flawlessly labeled with a fraudulent return address, and you’ll get something closer to the right analogy.
Barring that practice would not be enough IMHO; I agree with Susan that conduits are different. But it’s a dramatic example of the freedom the carriers now feel to treat packets any way they want. No “neither snow nor sleet” for the carriers completing these appointed rounds. If the mail is too much trouble to deliver, those damn mailbags get so heavy when it snows, just throw in a fraudulent message saying the senders had changed their minds about wanting their mail delivered at all.
“The difference between Gmail and ISP use of these techniques is that you can choose not to use Gmail. The market for internet access is much more concentrated.”
As a point of fact, this is incorrect. No customers will be subjected to NebuAd against their will. Please see the July 9 testimony of NebuAd CEO Bob Dykes before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation:
“In addition, NebuAd requires its ISP partners to provide robust disclosure notices to users prior to initiating any service and permits them to opt-out of having their data collected and receiving targeted ads. Once a user opts-out, NebuAd deletes that user’s anonymous user profile and will ignore the user’s subsequent web navigation activity.”
The problem I see with all the attempts to find some way to say Gmail-is-DIFFERENT-because …, is that however you try to slice it, it still says that widespread, massive, scanning of email by a big company to serve ads is OK. That’s a real problem if you’re trying to find a way to claim that scanning by ISP’s is somehow immoral.
Basically, could ISP’s offer a VOLUNTARY, OPT-IN, scanning? If so, then the argument is over the details of valid consent, not that the scanning itself is wrong. If you try to argue out of this by saying there’s no such thing as valid consent in the current monopolistic environment, that’s going to be strongly opposed, and sounds like an excuse.
how do you behave differently if you know that every utterance or action can be a trigger for advertising, and if you believe that some of that advertising may be intentionally deceptive? it has to do weird things to our psyches.
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