Privacy watchdog concerned about Internet giants’ reach – Investigation launched. Technology allows big companies to monitor what people are doing online
MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA – The privacy commissioner is launching an investigation into whether Canada’s telecommunications giants are breaking the law when they use technology that allows them to monitor the online activities of their Internet customers.
Bell Canada and Rogers Communications use Deep Packet Inspection, or DPI, technology to slow down Web traffic that chews up a lot of bandwidth during peak hours. But the technology permits Net service providers to do much more with it without the consent of their customers, contrary to Canada’s privacy legislation, according to the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.
The law clinic filed the complaint about the “unnecessary and non-consensual” collection and use of personal information to kick-start the investigation, which got under way yesterday.
Even though the companies say they don’t use the technology to snoop on their customers, Philippa Lawson, executive director of the law clinic, says it’s time for the privacy commissioner to weigh in on the matter.
DPI technology can be used for nefarious purposes, including reassembling emails and keeping track of Web searches and sites visited to create customer profiles for targeted marketing campaigns.
“When you’ve got this technology that lets them look at whatever they want, and they say they’re using it for just a bit, how do you control that?” Lawson asked.
“What we want to do is get the facts out on the table. What exactly are these companies doing with this technology and what are they considering doing? It’s all in transition, so look at it now before the practice becomes entrenched and provide the industry with some guidelines about what is acceptable and what is not.”
Rogers says its consumers have nothing to worry about. Ken Englehart, the company’s head of regulatory affairs, says it uses DPI only to separate peer-to-peer traffic from other traffic to make sure the network isn’t clogged up with bandwidth-heavy activity.
“We don’t know what that content is. We don’t know whether it’s video or voice. … It’s just being done to separate the content into two streams, so we don’t think there is any privacy issue whatsoever.”
The privacy complaint is a new front in an escalating battle over use of the technology by larger service providers.
Bell is also fighting smaller providers that purchase wholesale Net access from it and sell it to their own subscribers.
The Canadian Association of Internet Providers is asking the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to issue an immediate order to stop Bell from using DPI to traffic-shape the network space it sells to its members.
In its reply to the CRTC, Bell says its use of the technology does not affect the privacy of any customer because it simply looks at the application header and not the content itself of peer-to-peer traffic.
“The DPI equipment used by Bell does not retain the information it has reviewed from the packet headers and the content itself is not actually reviewed, analyzed or stored,” Bell wrote in its submission.
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