The Modern ISP Is A Privacy Nightmare

Forget dopes who leave your social security numbers on a company laptop at a bar, or phishing scams: University of Colorado law professor Paul Ohm believes the modern ISP, thanks to new technological developments like deep packet inspection, poses the greatest privacy threat to American consumers. Sure, NabuAD may have been beaten back this week, but Ohm believes the desire to make a revenue stream out of tracking absolutely everything you do online will be too great for ISPs to resist. From Ohm's Paper, The Rise and Fall of Invasive ISP Surveillance:

ISPs, faced with changes in technology, extraordinary pressures to innovate, and murky ethical rules, will continue aggressively to expand network monitoring. The AT&T, Comcast, Charter, NebuAd and Phorm examples will prove to be not outliers but the first steps in a steady expansion of industry practices. Unless some force—regulatory or non-regulatory—intervenes, the inevitable result will be ISPs conducting full-packet capture of everything their users do, supposedly with their users’ consent.

Ohm believes that absolutely everything you do online will eventually be tracked, stored and monetized -- unless someone steps up to broaden privacy and wiretap laws, with a more impartial government agency like National Institute Of Standards And Technology playing a central role. As Wired notes, government at the moment is primarily interested in weakening wiretap laws, though Congress has recently shown they're at least marginally interested in protecting privacy in the ISP/user relationship.

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Great info, Thanks. Need to figure out how to send and receive all information encrypted.