Original Articule:
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 11:00 AM PT Posted by Erik Larkin
AT&T To Spy on Your Internet Traffic
AT&T is getting together with Hollywood studios and recording companies to develop technology to snoop on your Internet traffic in search of pirated material, according to a story posted today by the LA Times. You'll need to register for free with the Times site to read the original story.
At a time when Apple, EMI and other companies are making the no-brainer, money-making decision to sell music without cumbersome and annoying digital-rights management, AT&T has decided to go the "Privacy? What privacy?" route.
This should flat out be illegal. To me, it's akin to AT&T deciding they're going to wiretap all of its cellular customer's phone calls to see if anyone is leaking company trade secrets. It also seems in keeping with AT&T's disdain for Net Neutrality, and willingness to hand off customer call records to the government.
The Times story suggests that AT&T's move is meant to protect profits from new pay-television services, and the piece says the technology will "not violate privacy laws or Internet freedoms espoused by the Federal Communications Commission."
Great to know my privacy is of concern - but there are just two problems with that glib statement. For one, we don't have a real, overarching law to protect privacy at the national level, like Europe. Privacy groups have been pushing for one for years, and I'd love to see it, but we don’t have one.
And as far as the FCC is concerned, something tells me they'd be more eager to block me from IM'ing dirty words than to protect me from this sort of Big Brother snooping.
The Times story doesn't say whether AT&T plans to implement the anti-piracy tech at Internet end-points, where you connect through your ISP to the Internet, in AT&T's massive backbone network that carries a huge amount of Internet traffic, or both. It also doesn't say whether AT&T will actually look into the files or Web pages you send and receive, or whether it would be a less intrusive analysis of the types of traffic being sent around.
Either way, if AT&T moves ahead with the plan I'll be looking for another ISP. I currently have AT&T Yahoo! DSL, but I think I'd prefer a company that at least pretended to put my privacy above its profits.
What about you?
Comments
I have the same carrier and I agree - their practices are becoming annoying! Gues they are winning the merger wars.
Sylectra
June 13, 2007
11:51 AM PT
It should be illegal but there is practically no chance that any privacy group will get anything pushed into any type of law that will matter even the littlest amount
reidbarry
June 13, 2007
1:09 PM PT
Along the same line, may I ask an open question? I have seen numerous time that the police and lawyers can access records of chats and surfing habits of Internet users. Do the various ISPs maintain records of all conversations and if so, for how long. I'd ask Yahoo myself but know they would lie to me in a heartbeat!
aibling328
aibling328
June 13, 2007
2:39 PM PT
This is an absolute disgrace!
I hope that there is enough customer opposition to this and that other ISPs don't follow suit.
Dugg!
http://digg.com/tech_news/AT_T_To_Spy_o ... et_Traffic
djjester
June 13, 2007
4:59 PM PT
***SOURCE OF THIS ARTICULE BELOW***
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/004644.html
