Charter Watcher

We won!

As of yesterday Charter has suspended their illegal wiretapping program with NebuAD over privacy concerns. Reuters has the story here. The fight isn’t over though, because companies like Charter never stop looking for ways to make money (which is understandable), and sometimes those methods stomp all over you and I.

From the article:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. cable television operator Charter Communications is suspending a program that would offer advertisers ways to target pitches at people based on what they search for on the Internet.

“As we do with all new service launches or initiatives, we conducted focus groups well in advance, which told us that most broadband consumers would look upon this service favorably,” Charter said on Wednesday.

“However, some of our customers have presented questions about this service as well as suggested improvements,” it said. “We will continue to take a thoughtful, deliberate approach with the goal to ultimately structure an advertising service that enhances the Internet experience for our customers and addresses questions and concern they’ve raised.”

How about that doublespeak, eh? Allow me to translate: “We thought that if we misled a bunch of specifically-chosen non-technical people in a focus group and got them to go along with the program, that we could just tout those results and slip it in without anyone noticing. Unfortunately we didn’t count on the massive customer and privacy group backlash, so we’re canning the program until we can find a more clever way to put it in without your noticing.”

Note that they’re not completely nixing the program, just suspending it. That means that it’ll be back, and with a company other than NebuAD. My guess is that since NebuAD just got outed as Gator 2.0, Charter is cutting and running until they can find someone else. And next time you can bet your bottom dollar that they won’t send out subscriber notifications or dispatch Ted Schremp to spread misinformation about the program.

I read an article yesterday about Allot communications, a company that makes deep packet inspection systems for ISP’s and NebuAD-type companies. As you may recall, one of NebuAD’s employees is a former senior engineer for that company. Since the DPI hardware is being manufactured by a company other than NebuAD, Charter will find it easy to pick up a new advertising provider using the same technology.

I’ll bet that Charter just moves everything in-house, which will eliminate the majority of the legal questions that have been raised in the last few months. Why use NebuAD when you can just buy a couple of Allot boxes and do it yourself?

No matter how you look at it, though, this is good news. We’ve won! Our privacy is safe for another day, and Charter has been made to eat a loss on this program.

To everyone who contacted me, and especially to everyone who contacted Charter, their representatives, and oversight bodies, thank you.

More coverage can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Charter lies about a lot more than just privacy

A couple of months ago I saw a commercial for Charter Communications which featured a man in a suit sitting at a computer talking about fiber optics. He explained that Verizon was getting a lot of publicity of their FIOS service, but maintained that Charter had been using fiber optics for years, insinuating that the services were equal in terms of speed and reliability. Then he pretended to type. Not only can Charter not hire competent executives or managers, but they can’t even get an actor to type convincingly on cue.

It bothered me even then that Charter would lie so boldly. Of course they use fiber optics in their network, as does virtually every company with more than a half dozen servers. Heck, my third bedroom has some fiber in play for my personal servers, and I’ve been using fiber to connect my music hardware for almost a decade. Does that put my technology on par with Charter’s? With Verizon’s? Since I use fiber too, can I now go on television and promise to deliver the exact same thing that these companies do?

Of course the answer is no, but that doesn’t stop Charter from comparing their decades-old cable technology to Verizon’s cutting-edge FIOS. It’s so blatant that even Forbes did a piece on it.

From the article:

Mike Weaver in Watauga, Texas, saw an ad from Charter Communications Inc. that talked about “advanced fiber optics,” and was disappointed when he realized that the cable company isn’t drawing fiber to the home. He wants the faster Internet speeds provided by FiOS, he said.

Charter spokeswoman Anita Lamont said the intent behind the current ads, which say the company has been using fiber for the last 10 years, “is to reassure current Charter customers that they too have fiber optic technology bringing their homes to life.”

Mike saw the same commercial I saw. In it Charter obviously compares their fiber optic network to Verizon’s, which indicates that Charter too offers fiber to the doorstep. According to Anita Lamont, this commercial is intended to do just that. Charter knows that the vast majority of customers won’t know that the fiber optic being touted in their commercials only refers to that in use in their datacenters. Charter knows that the majority of their customers won’t call them on their BS when they see a plain old coaxial cable strung across their backyard. Charter thinks that they can lie with impunity, and that no one will do anything about it. That is how much they think of you and I as customers.

So why is it surprising when they employ the same techniques in dealing with privacy? Charter’s standard procedure is to lie, bend the truth, and spread misinformation. We all know that they don’t have the same fiber optic network as Verizon, and we all know that they won’t protect our privacy.

But that isn’t going to stop them from lying through their teeth about it. There’s money to be made, and the truth is the only thing left standing in the way. Somebody call Ted Schremp. There’s BS that needs to be spread.

NebuAD is as bad as we thought

It seems like everyone has a recent article on NebuAD’s technology, which was once thought to be simple deep packet inspection only. As it turns out, NebuAD is actually conducting browser hijacks and modifying packets. The legality of this kind of thing isn’t really questionable. NebuAD is actively engaged in criminal activity.

From the article at eWeek:

According to a new technical report (PDF) by Free Press and Public Knowledge, NebuAd uses special equipment that “monitors, intercepts and modifies the contents of Internet packets” as consumers go online. The report found that NebuAd inserts extra hidden code into users’ Web browsers that was not sent by the Web site being visited.

In turn, the code directs the browser to another site not requested or even seen by the consumer, where more hidden code is downloaded and executed to add more tracking cookies. Using the secretly collected information, NebuAd serves up ads based on the user’s browsing habits.

There have been concerns that NebuAD might modify packets or inject script. This comes on the heels of a report last week showing how a company providing the same kind of wiretapping in England is actually crashing people’s browsers. I wonder what the penalties are for modifying copyrighted content, spying illegally on users, then crashing a user’s browser. I guess it’ll all depend on how much cash Charter brings to the upcoming hearings.

What interests me even more about this revelation is that it completely negates NebuAD’s previous statements on anonymity. Even if Charter is handing NebuAD completely anonymous lumps of raw data, stripped of sensitive subjects and identifiable information, NebuAD can just use this data to redirect you to one of their sites in order to load your browser up full of additional tracking software not hindered by Charter’s anonymity attempts. With a few tracking cookies and a bit of javascript now and again NebuAD could conceivably build a personal dossier on every Charter customer, complete with names, emails, association, interests, and lifestyle choices.

From the article at Wired:

NebuAd has conceded that its boxes peer deep into internet packets to pull out URLs and search terms in order to classify each user’s interests. That profile is then used deliver tailored ads on various partner websites.

Wait a minute. Didn’t Charter’s Ted Schremp, senior vice president of product management and strategy, definitively say that this system did not use deep packet inspection? Why yes, he did, in an interview with CNET here. The exact quote, in fact, was:

“The enhanced advertising solution does not utilize deep packet inspection. It looks at URL level information only. That’s another point of misinformation on the Net.”

Misinformation? I guess you would know better than anyone else about that, Mr. Schremp. The only thing customers can be 100% sure about is the unending stream of complete and utter BS coming out of both Charter and NebuAD. Misinformation exists because it has been used as a tool by both of these companies to obfuscate the true nature of the technology being employed. Slowly but surely, however, the truth is coming out. And it’s not pretty, especially for NebuAD. They’ve been counting on their program running quietly behind the scenes and under the radar.

From the article at MediaPost:

NebuAd said in a statement Wednesday that it was “disappointed with the misleading characterization” of its company in the report. NebuAd stated that its technology is no different from that of other ad networks. “Similar to most ad networks, we place cookies on users’ machines … All ad networks use a small piece of code that is temporary and operates only within the security framework of the browser to invoke the placement of ad network cookies. The code NebuAd uses is no different, and is clearly demarcated outside of and does not modify any publisher code.”

These people are delusional. Their technology is “no different from that of other ad networks”?! Maybe the fact that their advertising is based on a constant stream of my personal information passing through their system makes it different. Maybe their access to each and every packet which comes or goes from my house makes it different. Maybe their injecting javascript and redirects into sites owned by other people makes it different. Maybe the fact that they refuse to disclose their technology makes it different. Maybe their lack of patents makes it different. Maybe the fact that it is nowhere near “anonymous” makes it different.

Sure, NebuAD uses a cookie just like every other advertising company out there, but there’s a lot more than just a cookie in play here. There are evil men (and women) working hard to profit from the personal lives of you and I. They’re willing to spy on us, wiretap us, and monitor our every communication to make a buck, and in the end the only thing we can be completely sure that we’re getting out of the deal is crashed browsers, stolen identities, broken websites, and violations of our right to free association.

Exactly what do we have to do to stop companies like NebuAD from spreading such terrible practices into the world? It really makes you wonder how some of these people live with themselves.

How Charter and the federal government monitor you

I had the most interesting conversation with a Charter employee on Thursday. A couple of weeks ago I was speaking with Carla Conner, who is Charter’s customer care advocate for government issues. After explaining my concerns, a task made difficult by her lack of technical background, I asked to be escalated to her boss. Several weeks and a half-dozen phone calls later, I finally got a telephone call from a fellow named Michael Perisho, whose title I do not yet know.

I told Mike how Charter’s program would be invasive to privacy, that there were concerns with information being sold to third party advertising companies, that customers would be chilled from using their Internet access to conduct sensitive business knowing that they were monitored, that Charter’s misleading speech on the program was abusive to the public trust, and that American citizens had a right to be free from monitoring without a court order. What he said next absolutely floored me.

Charter Communications, and all other ISP’s, have monitoring hardware supplied by the United States federal government which maintains a records of what sites a customer visits. He explained in detail how smaller ISP’s which may not have the money to implement the technology themselves get it done for them by the government. He went on to explain that certain websites and material gets flagged and automatically turned over to the feds, which I assume is done without a warrant. He then went a step further, describing how at times the government will visit some specific and targeted web sites with an unknown IP address to check up on Charter to ensure that the system works, fining those ISPs which do not capture or report the traffic.

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution states, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Our founding fathers could not possibly have envisioned the rise of the Internet. They had no concept of an ISP. They did, however, account for every shred of personal property a person could own in their time. Their person, houses, papers, effects; one can surely categorize one’s own email inbox, bookmarks, and surfing habits as being among one’s personal papers or effects. The obvious conclusion is that a government organization attempting to gather data on an Internet user must have a warrant, if we’re to believe that the Constitution has any standing. The question is, when Charter and other ISP’s are installing their data retention hardware and colluding with the federal government to monitor your traffic, are they doing so in a manner which is consistent with United States law? If so, is the law which grants them access to such information consistent with the Constitution? Finally, why would Michael Perisho, when confronted with a broad line of questioning regarding Charter’s new advertising program, choose to start discussing Charter’s government-mandated monitoring instead?

Charter’s intention to pair up with NebuAD to monitor customers for the purposes of increasing advertising revenue is a major violation of both personal and consumer privacy. Charter’s collusion with the federal government to turn over information about a customer based on their surfing habits is unconstitutional, going completely against of one of our most basic freedoms. I can sort of see how Michael could get the two mixed up. They’re both really nasty, and both likely to eventually result in testimony before Congress.

What really bothers me is the future implications of these programs existing within the same network infrastructure. If Charter somehow gets the legal go-ahead with this deep packet inspection program, what’s to stop NebuAD’s unpatented, unexplained, untested hardware appliance from directing every blob with your MAC, IP, and raw packet to another database before creating their “anonymous” profiles? We’re talking about a literal recreation of your entire browsing history. If Charter and the federal government are already involved in red-flagging people for the feds, what’s to stop them from using the already-available DPI data mined for free by NebuAD to improve their hit rate?

Charter is currently only alerting the government when people visit certain websites. Soon they might be capable of alerting the feds when you string certain words together across a series of emails. They’ll also be able to turn over a complete reproduction of your clickstream to back it up. They’ll do this automatically, based on the keywords you type, the websites you visit, or the content of any emails you send or receive. Maybe they’ll have warrants, maybe they won’t.

But you’re not supposed to care. You’re next in line to get Charter’s “enhanced service,” which will help you keep up with the latest fashion by providing you with an endless stream of enhanced advertising directed to your personal interests. Ted Schremp, your personal guide to the world of better ads, is here to help!

Wired goes after NebuAD

Wired is back with another great article, this time about Charter’s partner-in-crime NebuAD. Everything about this company just oozes sleaze. Just look at their website. It’s not inviting or inventive, it’s just a blob. And wait until you see some of these quotes.

From the article:

“NebuAd does not overlay ads, inject ads or otherwise alter ads that are already displayed on a publisher’s web site,” [vice president of marketing Janet] McGraw said. “Observers should not infer from any patent how our business actually operates.”

Oh, so you’re going to team up with Charter to monitor us in a super secret way that has nothing to do with anything you’ve previously put on record? Thanks NebuAD, I feel so much better about my personal information being protected now.

McGraw says the company doesn’t need to read the cookie to respect the users’ opt-out request. The company has a way to create a unique identifier for each user based on information their browsers sends with any request for a web page.

“This association is done by applying proprietary patent-pending user identification algorithms that makes use of multiple elements of a browser request,” McGraw said in a written response to questions.

The company didn’t explain why it sets a cookie to begin with.

I’m starting to think that Janet McGraw went to the same school as Ted Schremp. “It doesn’t work like we said it did before, and it doesn’t work like Charter says it does. It’s something completely different, made from the breath of unicorns and programmed by elves in a far-off land.” How are we customers supposed to accept this program if the people running it can’t even pin down how it works? And where the hell do these companies find their marketing people?

THREAT LEVEL was unable to find a patent application for that system.

Wait, so you mean Janet McGraw, vice president of marketing for NebuAD and otherwise upstanding corporate citizen, was lying? You mean this system doesn’t completely protect every single aspect of my privacy despite its being kept completely secret? I didn’t know that companies were allowed to outright lie about how they protect customer privacy. I thought there were all sorts of laws about that.

NebuAd’s president Bob Dykes backed out of a planned interview with THREAT LEVEL last Tuesday, asking instead to answer written question. Days later, McGraw provided some information related to a few of the questions, but declined to answer most on the grounds they related to NebuAd’s “proprietary technology.”

Oh, it’s proprietary. Now I understand. You can’t tell me how you’re spying on me because you’ve found an incredibly clever approach that you don’t want your competition to find out about. Never mind the fact that there are a relatively limited number of ways to accomplish IP wiretapping, all of which are widely published. We all believe you when you say you’ve come up with something completely new to do to a protocol which has been around for over 30 years.

McGraw did not respond to a follow-up email Wednesday asking for clarification of how the opt-out system worked and for answers to the original, non-technical questions. The questions the company refused to answer are below.

• How deep into packets are you going to extract urls? How does Nebuads know what a given url means? Are the urls manually reviewed, ala the early days of ask jeeves, or do you use some sort of spider tied to a classification algorithm? How does the system handle search engine queries?
• How does opt-out system work with a cookie, given that NebuAd is a network appliance and can’t read the opt-out cookie unless the user goes to a specific site so that the cookie can be released and thus either read by Nebuad.com or read in the TCP stream. It seems that an ISP’s customers can opt out of the ads but not the monitoring? If that’s incorrect, please explain how the opt-out works? How does this system fit with the promises made on the NebuAd opt-out page?
• Why should an ISP’s customers want to allow your company to monitor their web usage?
• Is there anyone at the company with a background in privacy?
• If a customer wanted to see the profile NebuAd had built up about them, how would they do so?
• What exernal auditing has NebuAd had? Does the company plan to perform audits on an ongoing basis? Will any of those reports be public?
• Are your network boxes capable of injecting content into packets?
• What security measures does NebuAd take to lock down the network appliances and prevent NebuAd from being used for a Man-in-the-Middle attack?
• How long does NebuAd keep data?

This looks to me like a list of questions Congress needs to put in front of NebuAD. Heck, why not just let Ryan Singel do the questioning himself? He seems like a capable sort.

Does NebuAD sound like a company that you want snooping around in your web traffic? They don’t even know what they’re doing, and they certainly aren’t on the same page with Charter. Ultimately it is we the customer who should have the final say as to whether our activity is tracked, and we should be given every opportunity to review the methods by which it is accomplished.

Charter ranks dead last in customer satisfaction

In what will be a shock to absolutely no one, oanow.com reports today that Charter Communications has placed dead last in a customer satisfaction survey conducted by the American Customer Satisfaction Index at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Charter’s efforts to improve customer service and win back the respect of their subscribers obviously failed miserably last year, because they actually scored lower this time around than the last by two percent.

Charter got beat by Time Warner, Direct TV, DISH Network, Cox, and even the Internal Revenue Service. The only company terrible enough to match Charter at the bottom of the heap was Comcast, whose employees will crash on your couch while waiting for their own internal support to answer their calls. Isn’t it exciting to know that such an inept company as Charter is giving you guarantees that your personal information will be kept safe as they bundle it up and sell it to advertising companies?

From the article:

Lynne Coker, director of governmental affairs for Charter Communications, said the report is not a clear picture of what’s going on with the company.

Coker said the report may be measuring customer satisfaction only in regard to cable services and not the increased bundled services — cable, phone and Internet — the company offers.

“As people take advantage of those bundled services, those numbers should improve,” Coker said.

Wow. This Lynne Coker must hold an advanced degree from the Ted Schremp School of Delusional Business Doublespeak.

Another Ted Schremp interview, this time with extra BS!

Ted Schremp, senior vice president of product management and strategy, is back again today with a second interview, this time with CNET’s Declan McCullagh. This time he claims that Charter’s program does not utilize deep packet inspection, and that their new “enhanced service” is no different than giving their customers faster broadband speeds at no additional cost.

From the article:

Q: If you’re conducting deep packet inspection, that means you know what data your customers are transferring. Are you going to look for evidence of copyright infringement, child pornography, and so on as well?

The enhanced advertising solution does not utilize deep packet inspection. It looks at URL level information only. That’s another point of misinformation on the Net.

Q: You’re saying that URL-level information is not deep packet?

Suffice it to say that we’re using URL-level information only.

Huh, so I guess all of those articles out there on every other technical site and in every other interview, including the patent data from NebuAD itself describing their deep packet inspection model, is only “misinformation” and isn’t really using deep packet inspection after all. Is it just me or does this Ted Schremp guy sounds like he feasts on a big bowl of bullshit in the morning before he starts giving interviews just so his breath smells right for the occasion?

Q: If you’re getting a new stream of revenue from NebuAd, does that mean lower prices for your customers?

As we’ve gone into these pilots, we’ve conducted a series of focus groups to help us understand from their perspective, does this technology add value to their Internet experience, talk through privacy concerns, and so on. What our customers have shared with us is that they understand the fact that advertising is part of the Internet model. To the extent that fuels the economics behind the Internet, they understand that. They appreciate the notion that ads that are being served are attuned to their interests or potential interests.

We view it the same way as offering faster Internet speeds. This is no different. It’s about taking the latest technology and applying it as a way to be useful to our customers.

Schremp regularly talks about these focus groups, which must have been made up of hand-selected individuals chosen for their complete lack of understanding about the Internet, privacy, and technology. Based on the comments and articles I’ve seen, the only thing that Charter’s customers have confronted them with is negativity regarding this program. Of course Schremp has been programmed from birth to ignore negativity when presented with a better, less comprehensible company line, and proves once again in this interview that he is the perfect man to be selling this “enhancement” to Charter customers. It’s a wonder they aren’t actually raising prices over this.

And for the record, none of the Charter customers or technical service associates I’ve spoken with consider this on par with offering faster speeds. I don’t understand how spying on your customers, selling their private information to an advertising company, then lying through your teeth about how you’re going to collect, store, transmit, and secure their data is on par with bumping up your broadband rates. But then again I’m no Ted Schremp.

The key from our perspective is that we’re very customer-oriented in everything we do. The privacy concerns and the ability of our customers to opt-out and the fact that we’re talking today is indicative of that as well. We want to be very clear that they have a choice.

That’s great, Ted. Now exactly where can I exercise my choice not to be a part of your illegal wiretapping program?

Broadband Reports covers Charter’s new program

Broadband Reports has a new article up about the NebuAD program too. It seems that everyone is getting in on the action now that Charter has made itself such a target for people concerned about online privacy. The article also addresses one of the many problems with the opt-out provided by Charter and NebuAD.

From the article:

Of course Charter’s FAQ on the service fails to inform customers that the cookie doesn’t stop them from tracking you, just from sending you personalized ads. Interestingly, Charter’s opt out form doesn’t bother to tell customers the name of the company (I assume it’s NebuAD, whose CEO I interviewed last February).

We know for sure that the company is indeed NebuAD. The article is also correct in that using the opt-out does not actually stop Charter from tapping your Internet connection, building an electronic dossier on your interests, then selling that information to NebuAD. Your request to be excluded from the system only impedes the advertising from actually being displayed in your browser. Behind the scenes, your privacy is still violated regardless of whether you opt out or not. Don’t count on Charter telling you that though. In this case, obscurity is their friend.

And although the story at Broadband Reports is short, there is one great gem at the very end:

Charter sells your browsing information for profit, while you get no reduction in service price and are forced to use an opt-out process that doesn’t entirely work. Sound like an enhanced online experience to you?

I couldn’t have put it any better myself.

The New York Times interviews Charter VP Ted Schremp

The New York Times is running an online article by Saul Hansell about Charter’s snooping program, complete with an interview with Ted Schremp, senior VP for product management and strategy. What did Mr. Schremp have to say about his company collecting private data to be turned over to an advertising firm?

From the article:

He offered his personal view that the system was harmless and well within the norms of the Internet these days. “The mainstream Internet user is hugely aware of the fact that the fundamental economic model on the Internet is advertising,” he said. While some people object to targeted advertising systems like Google’s Gmail, which displays ads related to the text of e-mail users are reading, many others don’t.

First of all, Mr. Hansell doesn’t seem to understand the critical difference between Google’s advertising system, which collects user data and feeds it into a Google-owned and operated advertising algorithm, and Charter’s, which collects user data and sells it to an advertising company not otherwise associated with Charter’s customers. In the interest of clarification, let’s just simplify the comparison by saying that one is legal, and the other is not. Mr. Schremp is partly correct in his assertion that the fundamental economic model on the Internet does seem to be advertising, but that only goes for companies other than ISP’s. For companies like Charter the economic model is very, very different. Google and other such services simply do not have the same level of access to a user’s interests and traffic, and are not responsible for facilitating a user’s actual connection to the Internet. Their model, quite simply, is advertising. Charter, on the other hand, does a poor enough job at fulfilling their own fundamental economic model, that being Internet access, that they have no business attempting to put themselves into competition with companies such as Google.

“All we are doing is, in an anonymous format, providing additional context to serve those ads. To the extent those ads are more meaningful to me as Ted Schremp, I will have a better Internet experience than the generic ads that are part of Yahoo and everything online.”

I want you to think about whether or not the advertisements you see on web pages are meaningful to you personally, and to ask yourself how much better your Internet experience would be if the advertisements you saw were more targeted to your interests. Now, is that worth letting your Internet provider monitor your every move to capture your habits, then sell that information to a company trying to convince you to buy things?

For those customers who disagree, Mr. Schremp said that Charter was offering the ability for them to choose not to be part of the system. I suggested that most privacy experts prefer opt-in systems where information isn’t collected until the user explicitly grants permission. He said that opt-out has become the norm for all targeting on the Internet.

Opt-out has become the norm because companies such as Charter have declared it to be the norm. It’s a lot easier to leave the majority of your customers in the dark about your programs and profit from their private information than to beg customers to let you make extra money from the content of their lives.

Mr. Schremp did acknowledge that raising revenue was a main goal for Charter in this: “We want to leverage technology in a way that makes sense for our economic model.”

Here’s the real reason this is happening. NebuAd is paying Charter “several dollars per subscriber a month,” and Charter could really use the money, seeing as their stock price recently dropped so low as to see them delisted by Nasdaq. It’s a shame that their management is so inept as to believe that the road to becoming profitable runs directly through the very privacy they’re required by federal law to protect.

Techdirt calls Charter out over misleading language

Techdirt.com has an article today about the misleading language Charter is using to cram their wiretapping program down customer’s throats. By calling it a “service enhancement” Charter cleverly gets around the legal provisions that all data collected on customers must fulfill a legitimate business purpose to facilitate services for the customers. Since Charter’s arrangement with NebuAd only serves the interests of Charter and NebuAd, some marketing doublespeak is definitely needed to sell this as a legitimate and legal program.

From the Techdirt.com article:

Beyond questions raised over the legality of such things, there are many questions raised concerning how such systems violate privacy. There have been calls to make sure that these types of solutions are opt-in only. In the meantime, ISPs that are adopting these solutions are trying to present them in the best possible light. Witness cable broadband provider Charter, who is pitching its use of NebuAd as a way to bring you its “enhanced online experience.” Charter, which is setting this up as a opt-out solution, rather than an opt-in solution, sent an email to its subscribers, talking up all the wonderful “enhancements,” brushing over the fact that it’s basically exposing all of your surfing history to advertisers, and inserting its own ads into your experience. I’m not sure most users would actually consider that to be “enhanced.”

One has to wonder exactly what the customer will get out of this besides identity theft and future headaches. Sure, advertising will be more targeted to our interests, but as intelligent and capable consumers are we not capable of deciding what products we want or need even without advertising? Furthermore, now that our packets have to be stopped in transit to have some of their content replaced in order to inject the advertisements into our connection, would this program not actually slow down the average Charter customer’s connection?