Dan Taylor

While I’m not in the usual practice of surfing for letter bomb designs or other items from the Anarchist Cookbook, but at the same time I DO appreciate a bit of anonymity in where I’m traveling on the information superhighway.  Hence when I saw this article pop up at Wired today, I felt compelled to give it a read.

It seems as though a company called NebuAD has been up to some very naughty things.  The business model was based on paying ISPs a fee to let them install equipment to monitor surfers trails and what their search queries were all in order to deliver targeted ads based on user behavior.  The kind of data that companies will pay fortunes for.  Naturally, every mom and pop internet provider raised their hands in support.

All was good in the land of NebuAD until one of the nation’s largest ISPs, Charter Communication announced their intent to test NebuAD.  This announcement raised a number of smoke signals in Washington, and the House Energy and Commerce committee quickly became interested in whether tracking people’s every move wasn’t a violation of federal law.  Let’s spare the irony and ‘Patriot Act’ questions…for now.

Naturally, the inquiry signaled the end of the road for NebuAD, as it quickly became apparent that no ISP was willing to go tete-a-tete with the feds on untested technology.

CEO and Founder Bob Dykes recently resigned for a rather plush gig at VeriFone, a retail payment system firm.  Incidentally,  this announcement comes only one day after the AP ran the obituary for NebuAD.
While NebuAD claimed to be all about transparency, notice, choice and consent, the Congressional equiry revealed that several ISPs had secretly tested the technology (without customer consent), and NebuAD was left speechless when it came to explaining their ‘miraculous opt-out’ process.  A separate report by watchdog groups brought to light the fact that the company also violated key internet protocols and inserted rogue code into incoming packets from sites such as Google.  Ouch.

And now for a moment of irony –

While the feds stepped in to block a commercial enterprise from tracking anyone on the internets, was it perhaps for a higher purpose?

In July, Congress decided that the US Federal Government was within it’s rights to install NSA surveillance ‘equipment’ in any American IS or infrastructure.  Let me say that again…if you’re using an ISP from within the United States of America, the US government has the right to monitor any of your activities.  Granted, the chances that you’re selected as one to be monitored are probably quite low, it still a bit downright creepy that Big Brother could, and has the right to be, watching.