Re:Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance ris...
by jka on Friday April 06, 2018 @04:27PM
(#16777072)
For the layman user (likely 99%+ of these ISP user populations), using an ISP essentially provides near-entire browser history to them, at least to the granularity of domain name.
A surprising number of sites (and/or assets, images, etc) still don't use TLS, and so for those it's also possible for an ISP to understand what the user was reading/accessing.
Even for sites which do support TLS, if the ISP hypothetically had a partnership with a single data broker / advertiser which was also on the page, it's likely not hard to have a pretty precise idea of their interests/viewing.
You're right that Google and Facebook will continue to have very narrow and precise information about people's daily lives; it's simultaneously true that ISPs will continue to have broad & ongoing profiling information across any touchpoints as people use the internet.
A surprising number of sites (and/or assets, images, etc) still don't use TLS, and so for those it's also possible for an ISP to understand what the user was reading/accessing.
Even for sites which do support TLS, if the ISP hypothetically had a partnership with a single data broker / advertiser which was also on the page, it's likely not hard to have a pretty precise idea of their interests/viewing.
You're right that Google and Facebook will continue to have very narrow and precise information about people's daily lives; it's simultaneously true that ISPs will continue to have broad & ongoing profiling information across any touchpoints as people use the internet.