AT&T To Spy on Your Internet Traffic
AT&T is getting together with Hollywood studios and recording companies to develop technology to snoop on your Internet traffic in search of pirated material, according to a story posted today by the LA Times. You'll need to register for free with the Times site to read the original story.
At a time when Apple, EMI and other companies are making the no-brainer, money-making decision to sell music without cumbersome and annoying digital-rights management, AT&T has decided to go the "Privacy? What privacy?" route.
This should flat out be illegal. To me, it's akin to AT&T deciding they're going to wiretap all of its cellular customer's phone calls to see if anyone is leaking company trade secrets. It also seems in keeping with AT&T's disdain for Net Neutrality, and willingness to hand off customer call records to the government.
The Times story suggests that AT&T's move is meant to protect profits from new pay-television services, and the piece says the technology will "not violate privacy laws or Internet freedoms espoused by the Federal Communications Commission."
Great to know my privacy is of concern - but there are just two problems with that glib statement. For one, we don't have a real, overarching law to protect privacy at the national level, like Europe. Privacy groups have been pushing for one for years, and I'd love to see it, but we don?t have one.
And as far as the FCC is concerned, something tells me they'd be more eager to block me from IM'ing dirty words than to protect me from this sort of Big Brother snooping.
The Times story doesn't say whether AT&T plans to implement the anti-piracy tech at Internet end-points, where you connect through your ISP to the Internet, in AT&T's massive backbone network that carries a huge amount of Internet traffic, or both. It also doesn't say whether AT&T will actually look into the files or Web pages you send and receive, or whether it would be a less intrusive analysis of the types of traffic being sent around.
Either way, if AT&T moves ahead with the plan I'll be looking for another ISP. I currently have AT&T Yahoo! DSL, but I think I'd prefer a company that at least pretended to put my privacy above its profits.
What about you?
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I have the same carrier and I agree - their practices are becoming annoying! Gues they are winning the merger wars.
It should be illegal but there is practically no chance that any privacy group will get anything pushed into any type of law that will matter even the littlest amount
Along the same line, may I ask an open question? I have seen numerous time that the police and lawyers can access records of chats and surfing habits of Internet users. Do the various ISPs maintain records of all conversations and if so, for how long. I'd ask Yahoo myself but know they would lie to me in a heartbeat!
aibling328
This is an absolute disgrace!
I hope that there is enough customer opposition to this and that other ISPs don't follow suit.
Dugg!
http://digg.com/tech_news/AT_T_To_Spy_on_Your_Internet_Traffic
aibling
I know the police and such can access a phone line with a warrant but only for a limited time maybe 15 secs. if nothing is said criminally or pertaining to the warrant they have to disconnect after said time.
When I read about AT&T working with the FBI to snoop on their customers internet activities, I decided to leave AT&T for my local cable provider. That and the fact that cable is 7 times faster was all I needed. Now this article comes out and makes me glad to have made that decision. Goodbye AT&T!!
If I was with AT&T I would think hard about putting anything on a forum like this....
GET A ****** LIFE YOU GREEDY ******** AND GET OVER IT!!!!!!!!!!!
Another Feather in "KING GEORGE'S CROWN!!!THE RIGHT WING REPUBLICANS SCORE ANOTHER TOUCHDOWN!!TAKEING AWAY ARE RIGHT"S!!!
well at&t sold out to the liberal democrats and hillary is behind this so if
it comes to protecting my assumed right to privacy it will be a loss for anyone that tries to unsurp my constitutional right against illegal search and seizure, that's why we have lawyers from solid Repulican
Conservative familiy's that don't mind getting a few noses bloody when the sh*t get's rough,
I also have AT&T. I love the service and when I have had trouble they were right there to help.BUT if this goes through then its GOOD BYE AT&T.
I thought AT&T was trying to clean up it's "less than stellar" reputation?.... Uhhhhhhhh....this doesn't help. Here they go again. Comical.
I was concerned and uneasy about AT&T, when I found out they were feeding all email to the government. Not that I have anything to hide. I don't. However, on principle there should be no warrantless searches and massive data mining of customer information.
It's unconstitutional and one reason we had the Revolutionary War. The British government agents used to have open ended search warrents for entire towns to see if they could turn up anything subversive. That's the same thing as data mining - having no preset person or thing you're looking for. Instead, just poking around and seeing what turns up.
I for one am appalled that we are fighting for our freedoms in this War on Terror, only to be giving up our freedoms to do it.
This latest DRM violation data mining is the last straw. I just signed up with my local cable company, even though I'm a long term PacBell, SBC, and now AT&T customer. I fervently hope they aren't secretly doing the same thing.
DON'T THEY HAVE ENOUGH TO DO LIKE WATCH THE PREZ ON TV?
At the rate this government is becoming more like the Nazis maybe we should fight them like the French residence fought the Nazis start blowing up phone lines and electric lines and hit them in their pocket books. This may be drastic but if you read how the Nazis got started and how every year we lose more of our rights it's not so far fetched as it sounds. Every where you go you have to produce an ID card just like the 1940's Jews did. You can't even get your own kids records without a lot of problems. Should we all start Hail Hitler our so called Representives ?
Man, someone is really confused...
"well at&t sold out to the liberal democrats and hillary is behind this ... MIGUNIJune 28, 20078:34 AM PT"
MIGUNIJ, it is not the democrats or Hillary that are the ones who are systematically stripping away our personal rights, it's the party that is sleeping with big business, it's the president that has sent our father and mothers, brothers and sister, our family members and freinds to fight a loosing battle we should have never been involved in, the president that during the Katrina rebuild suspended the Davis-Bacon Act to allow Halliburton to hire workers at a lower wage while taking work away from those who needed it after loosing everything else - it's the republicans, it's Dick Cheney and King George Bush who are the ones who are behind the push to take away all of our rights and to give illegal immigrants everything on a silver platter while our citizens pay through the nose for it.
U thought that U got rid of AT&T in the 1984 divestiture maylay...well they r BACK! Plus with the blessings of a government who attempted to destroy them and caused thousands of people to lose their jobs for many years!!
U thought that U got rid of AT&T in the 1984 divestiture maylay...well they r BACK! Plus with the blessings of a government who attempted to destroy them and caused thousands of people to lose their jobs for many years!!
hmmm... I'm more concerned about the bandwidth or response time overhead that the analysis of my internet traffic will cause. Accessing many websites is already unresponsive enough (delay of approx 5 seconds) despite my 1500k and 512k ADSL connections.
But if the "snooping" is actually AI picking up keywords rather then human beings looking at your internet traffic willy-nilly, then I'm OK with it, oh wait, no I'm not because just like everyone else, I occasionally download something ILLEGAL! LOL! I think those big companies make enough profit, so I'm against piracy monitoring.
However, as for high crimes, I think the appropriate agencies for each country should AI scan for keywords like "child po*n" and "blow-up" and "assassinate", etc, so that the big criminals are more likely to be caught before they commit their evil. But at the same time, they should upgrade the worlds Internet backbone to minimize or eliminate the overhead that the AI scanning will cause.
You can add COMCAST to the list right beside AT&T
I received an email "notice of copyright violation" from them identifying a torrent I downloaded of an HBO TV show. I was warned they could shut off my internet access if I continued to do such things. You've been warned!!!! Funny how they never had a problem with me downloading anything until it was a TV show that I should be paying for by subscribing to HBO.