Congressmen Not Happy About Charter's Plan To Sell Out Users To Advertisers
from the might-want-to-think-twice dept
While Charter Communications is out defending its efforts to inject ads into your surfing activities by collecting data on where you surf, it appears that some powerful Congressional Representatives are suggesting that Charter might want to think twice about implementing this. Reps. Ed Markey and Joe Barton (who both have a fair amount of power in Congress) have sent Charter a letter warning the company that doing this without letting people affirmatively opt-in may violate the Communications Act, which limits what cable companies can do with customer records. What's really surprising is that, after so much anger over similar efforts in the UK (including similar questions about legality) that Charter forged right ahead with a nearly identical plan in the US, positioning it as an "enhancement." Update And on top of this, reports are now coming out that opt-ing out of this system isn't so easy after all.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: advertising, clickstream tracking, congress, ed markey, joe barton, opt-in, opt-out
Companies: charter communications
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http://www.purepwnage.com/
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A simple solution
Taking a cue from the end of the linked story at the bottom of the piece, Congress could make it illegal to track, trace, or tamper with data transmitted over the internet. End of nonsense. As if...
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Re: A simple solution
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Cheers.
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Re:
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Re: Re:
You are suggesting they would be fine with it, if it were a telco.
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Re: Re:
Well, both Markey and Barton have their fair share of ridiculousness (check out Barton's hearings on video game violence, for example), but in Markey's case, he's definitely not paid for by the telcos. He's the guy pushing for net neutrality regulations that the telcos hate.
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This is cool
http://www.antiphorm.com/page_software.htm
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uk...
oh and they have set the law governing such things so that *only* the governbent can start a legal case...
don't hold your breath, once it becomes common knowlegde among the monkeys in power that they can see *everything* you see on line they will start salivating at the posibilities to 'protect the children' etc.
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One more bad idea
The next day the kids are surfing for WebKins, and oops up pop pr0n ads full of naughty bits.
I can't WAIT for that lawsuit against Charter.
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Not Just Charter
I deleted them and replaced them with empty read-only files with the same names today. We'll see how that works.
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Bresnan-NebuAd
Also check out this discussion on dslreports; http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20258823?hilite=
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