As if the infiltration of our privacy by advertisers hasn’t been bane enough, we no longer have to fear *the cookie* as the new evil is deep packet filtering being conducted by many ISPs into the activities of their customers, relaying this info to marketers’ and advertisers’ perusal.

I can’t even begin to express my distaste at such actions and wonder if it was exactly this kind of scenario the people who run this country had in mind when they decided to start treating all of us like energizer batteries for their marketing machine.

UGH :

The Washington Post is reporting that some Internet Service Providers (ISP) have been using deep-packet inspection to spy on the communications of US customers. Deep packet inspection allows the ISP to read the content of communications including every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered, in short every click and keystroke that comes down the line. The companies involved assert that customers’ privacy is protected because no personally identifying details are released, but they make money from selling the information to advertisers who use the information to target their online pitches. Deep packet inspection is a significant expansion over tools like cookies in the ability to track users.

You can liken it to a phone company listening in on your conversations.

Read the New York Times article on the same controversy here.

=
c