RSSUpdate: Comcast Stops Spying on Subscribers
By Nate Mook | Published February 13, 2002, 2:25 AM
Cable provider Comcast on Wednesday said it would stop tracking its users after coming under fire from subscribers and privacy advocates. "Beginning immediately, we will stop storing this individual customer information in order to completely reassure our customers that the privacy of their information is secure," said Comcast President Stephen Burke in a statement. Comcast acknowledged Tuesday that it had begun recording each Web site its subscribers visit and admitted to storing the data for days.
The comapny said the information was being used to optimize and improve the speed of its network. Passwords and credit card numbers transmitted to Web sites were among the information that was being stored into a giant database managed by Inktomi. Comcast says the information was being used to optimize and improve the speed of its network and such action is permitted under its service agreement with subscribers.
The move prompted an outcry from users and numerous privacy groups who warn the information could potentially put customers at risk and is a breach of privacy. Comcast said it will not share any data gathered about its customers and collects only that which is common practice in the industry. But AOL and EarthLink, the two largest Internet service providers in the United States, say they do not track which Web sites users visit and have no interest in doing so.
An Inktomi representative said Tuesday that much of the information collected by Comcast is "not needed" for optimizing its network.
Comcast spokesperson Tim Fitzpatrick told the Associated Press that the company stores the numerical IP address assigned to the subscriber and the IP address of the requested Web page. Although subscriber information is not stored with each record, it would be fairly easy to correlate the IP address with a customer name.
Transparent proxy servers are being rolled out to complete this task, requiring all Comcast users to browse the Web through a virtual middle man. Subscribers in Michigan learned of the switch the hard way, as a mis-configured server caused Web browsing to slow down to a crawl, many told BetaNews.
A link to Comcast's new High-Speed Internet subscriber agreement redirected to a "Not Found" page at press time. However, the company's older @Home agreement carries a similar clause regarding the collection of information.
its like that tv show that says "trust no one".
WHy do you think betanews.com has all these popup ads? betanews is after us, they want to see how many porn sites we visit - be careful!
careful observant citizen gosh
Score: 0
|Does that mean BetaNews is all about helping better the quality of porn on the net? (hahaha)
Score: 0
|Any one who has ever set up a Proxy server with "Web Acceleration" knows that everyhing that goes by gets cached. The only difference is how long a page stays cached before it gets purged.
It is up to the Webpage how long the page is good for. On a secure site that ought to be set to 5 minutes or less, and would therefore be purged almost Instantly. But I have noticed that this is not the case with many small on-line shops.
The person who commented on encypted pages is right. If it is encrypted it sets on the server encrypted. But again many small shops don't use any encryption.
If you asked 100 ISP's 98 would tell you they use Caching servers to speed up your internet connection, 1 would be lying and the remaing 1 will be out of business in 6 months.
I don't care who you use they have caching servers, the only way around using these caching servers is to make certain that you do not have any thing entered in the proxy configuration of IE (If you use @ home you have this set most likely) and to use a Public DNS for your DNS Entry.
Brandon N. Wirtz
www.Digerat.com
www.Griffin-Digital.com
Score: 0
|You can be proxied without entering anything into your proxy settings. Transparent proxying technology has been available for years. :-)
Score: 0
|None of this would make browsing faster
UNLESS they cache the visited websites.
There is no reason to have your privat info stored at all and is against any better judgement, what is this now policing everything and everyone?
Dammned man we pay prices for service not to be guinneah pigs for someone elses interests.
What happened to the term free world here?
Score: 0
|I have noticed that recently ZoneAlarm goes off because of an inbound request. The IP address that is trying to get into my system is non-other than a Comcast DNS server IP...
Score: 0
|Firewalls 'go off' all the time - think of it as part of the Internet background noise - a passing port scanner could trigger it, so it's nothing to worry about. It seems unlikely that Comcast would use one of their core DNS server machines to hack into your computer, so I'd just assume it's a side-effect of a misconfigured multicast server, trying to update its routing table.
Score: 0
|I used to log portscans by a Comcast DNS server every 6 hours. I remedied it by adding their ip to hosts.deny You'd be surprised what companies will use their DNS servers for. (DNS is light, it can handle this too.)
Score: 0
|are you using a constant connection such as CAble MOdem or ADSL? if so then of course you will get these requests from DHCP and UBR servers they are re-leasing an IP to you as you only keep it for 4 hours (well normally), if you setup ZoneAlarm correctly adding your UBR, DHCP, DNS Servers etc to the safe list then you will only get displayed the important stuff 90% of my firewall logs are from my ISPs DHCP and DNS servers checking if i am online and if i need a new IP address etc etc, it is nothing to get worried about.
Score: 0
|They can not store credit card numbers or any information transmitted over SSL. Even theoretically...
Score: 0
|What a surprise! I had Zone Alarm on my computer about 1 and 1/2 years ago. At that time,as now, I had Comcast as one of my browsers.To make a long story short,my computer was getting "pinged" on the average of once every 30 seconds by an "unknown" I.P. address that "could have been a virus". I ended up assuming it was Comcast spying on my family,so I got rid of the browser and all of Comcasts' framework. Ever since then, I rely solely on the IE or Netscape browsers,NOT COMCAST!!! I strongly suggest the ACLU stops farting around with stupid lawsuits ,and go after Comcast for illegal privacy invasion!!
Score: 0
|now how the heck does storeing ur credit card information 'optimize' a netowork?.. I would love to see that one stand up in court.
Score: 0
|OMG, I'm glad I'm not a comcast customer anymore!
Score: 0
|I wish there was a good alternative in the South Jersey area. For me, at least, it's Comcast or satellite (or dialup- )... No DSL is available for me at anywhere near equivelant speeds. And they talk about Microsoft being a monopoly!
Score: 0
|I know how you feel, my last home was outside DSL reach. I managed to get away from ComCast when I relocated. I don't expect they managed to get credit card numbers simply for the fact that every site that I've ever been to encrypted that information. It would look like garbled data to a proxy.
Score: 0
|Spies all spies. Keep in mind it they arent watching you someone is:) We live in a societey which contains loop holes. You think that your free you can do what you want. Well so can they. The law allows loop holes to cover the wrong doers and to penalize the ones that cant afford protection. Where else can you get a ticket for speeding. Just to find out that you can pay an 85 dollar ticket or spend 3000 to prove your innocent
Score: 0
|Because... uhh then they could see WHO you spend the most money with, optmize more of their site, get some sort of marketing deal with them to make them more money.. hahah or uhh... er... optimize their caching servers or something
Score: 0
|Encryption can be broken...
Score: 0
|true... my limited understanding of SSL is that the computing power necessary to crack it is absolutely nuts, but like i said, limited knowledge here...
encryption (just like locks) can only keep out honest people. if there's a will, there's a way.
Score: 0
|128 bit ssl will keep not only honest people out, but any people without several supercomputers running for months...
Score: 0
|Or until the your SETI screensaver turns into a secret decoder ring. LOL
Score: 0
|