That privacy legislation

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dave Burstein <daveb () dslprime com>
Date: April 27, 2009 11:30:07 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: That privacy legislation

Dave and folk

Boucher is going to introduce privacy legislation and from the way the  
Congressman described it two weeks ago the fix is already in for rapid  
passage. Unfortunately, it looks to only handle the most egregious  
practices.  As I understand what's floating around D.C., any carrier  
can in the middle of 8 pages of fine print  insert something vague and  
thereafter totally track everything you do.  Its corporate support  
seems to be coming from those who want a weak bill to preempt a strong  
one, but this isn't my expertise.

"The state of DPI in the US right now is that nobody uses it for  
anything like consumer tracking, the carriers were very clear about  
that," is true as regards large commercial deployments. Carriers are  
already going much further in trials, and I believe the only delay is  
that the technology is just getting there. Deutsche Telekom's CTO two  
years ago said his new network is being designed to track "every  
session of every user, all the time." The Microsoft/AT&T IPTV system  
made similar claims four years ago, but I understand still isn't  
working right. What I hear from carrier CEO's is full speed ahead.

At the Cable Show in D.C., speaker after speaker spoke about the money  
they will make from getting information from every home and targeting  
advertising. The cable guys, like AT&T, are buying systems designed to  
deliver ads to single homes.  One even said their system was better,  
because it could monitor the separate choices of different users in  
the home. For now, almost none of that is production-ready in volume  
despite many promises.

I think it's pretty safe to assume they will soon be using everything  
they have unless limited by law. Everything usually includes your bill  
payment history, income, age, what countries you phone (for travel  
ads), ethnic origin, combined with any useful detail about where you  
go on the web and what you watch (80-99% accuracy.)  There are many  
opinions on what's right or wrong here. I suspect a strong majority of  
net users/TV watchers would happily surrender their privacy to get  
slightly less irrelevant ads and the debate will fade and the old  
fogies like me will fade into insignificance.

Beyond the information going to advertisers is the apparent demand by  
most governments for all that information and more for security. I  
noticed that some next generation standards read like they were  
designed to harden the great firewall of China and facilitate  
unlimited tracking. As I came close to the discussion, it appeared  
that these were government requirements simply not open to question.  
In particular, the U.S. government has been active as it looks to use  
less expensive "civilian" technologies.

Again, I'm pretty sure of the technology trends here but am working on  
inference about the coming legislation. Please filter through your own  
value judgments.
db





-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com