It looks like Charter has decided to sell its customers out and operate an intrusive and worrying packet inspection reading system to send ads to your browser whether you like it or not.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080513-charter-enhances-internet-service-with-targeted-ads.htmlAs reported last night by the Consumerist, Charter is testing a new DPI product that scans customers' online traffic to deduce their desires, then uses that information to show them highly-targeted ads. On an FAQ page about the new program, Charter refers to it as an "enhancement to your web browsing experience." Judging by the early responses online, we're not sure that most users will agree.
Because such systems can actually peek inside packets, they can glean far more information than mere IP addresses. Having an IP address might tell the system what sites you visit on a regular basis, but for sites like Amazon.com, this is less than helpful. DPI gear can see exactly what pages on the site are being accessed, though, and it can scan those pages for keywords to use in building its profile. Charter provides little information about how much of this sort of thing its system does, but a company spokeswoman did confirm to Ars that NebuAd is the "technical partner" for the new service
This sort of technology is of concern to us here as we resent the idea that an ISP can "place" advertising on our site pages by stealth simply by intercepting your browser traffic and inserting ad's in the page without our permission, we are strongly against advertising and this would make it look like we where profiting from winmx users when in fact this site runs at a loss, you can see how disappointing this is to us to here of yet another scheme to abuse network management tools at the expense of the customers privacy.
