Ready For Your Deep Packet Inspection?

Enhanced online experience. Deep Packet Inspection. Sound slightly obscene to you?

A little, maybe--but only if you value your privacy.

Seems that Charter Communications is getting ready to enhance their ad revenues at your expense. If you have Charter as your email/internet provider, you may be interested to know that they will soon be sniffing through your emails and targeting you with ads based on what you write, and the websites that you visit. From Consumerist and freepress.net:

Charter Communications is sending letters to its customers informing them of an "enhanced online experience" that involves Charter monitoring its users' searches and the websites they visit, and inserting targeted third-party ads based on their web activity. Charter, which serves nearly six million customers, is requiring users who want to keep their activity private to submit their personal information to Charter via an unencrypted form and download a privacy cookie that must be downloaded again each time a user clears his web cache or uses a different browser.

...

...an implementation of "deep packet inspection," is more worrying to us. Deep packet inspection allows an ISP to [Charter] monitor not only its users searches and visited websites, but also the type of activity (e.g., email or peer-to-peer), which could be used for traffic shaping and threatens net neutrality.

Are we right then in assuming that even in this era of enhanced government domestic spying that we should praise Charter's new initiative? After all, is it not tantamount to privatized spying? Yes! A good thing, indeed!

Well, let's have a look at how 'ol Charter's doin'--our new role model of deregulated (and therefore highly efficient) corporate citizenship and responsibility (from Morning Sun and freepress.net:

Charter Communications, the monopoly that controls the cable TV in mid-Michigan, is either cutting back and ignoring its customers or trying hard to be the best it can be, depending on who you talk to.

Jan Howard, executive director of the Mid Michigan Area Cable Consortium, said the number of complaints she has received from customers about Charter Communications have increased dramatically since the inception of the Uniform Video Services Local Franchise Act last year.

"There have been a number of concerns about billing and customer service,"Howard said. Although municipalities can no longer provide protection for Charter customers, they are still the primary resource of customer complaints because the city is the local franchising authority. On Dec. 21 2006, Gov. Granholm signed the legislation to promote competition among video service providers in Michigan. That legislation went into effect January 2007.

One year later, some have concerns that the law is having a detrimental effect on cable customers.

Prior to the law, cable providers in Michigan were subject to federal laws and regulations that were uniform across the country. These laws were designed to protect all parties including the cable provider, the customer and local governments. Enforcement was implemented by local communities, which could apply local standards and in turn invoke fines on the cable providers if they were not following the standards.

Under the act, that is no longer possible.

...

"They (Charter) have no fear. Who is going to bother them? What do they risk by not listening to these people?"Howard said.

Full article here.

Thank goodness we don't have an ISP/cable monopoly in the High Country. Doh!