Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable system in the United States, has started telling its high-speed Internet customers that it is going to keep track of every site they visit on the Web.
The cable company will sell the data to a firm called NebuAd, which in turn will use it to show ads to Web-surfing Charter customers that are meant to be related to their interests. (Visit a knitting site yesterday and see yarn ads today.)
Charter started sending letters out to several hundred thousand customers in four markets: Fort Worth, Tex.; San Luis Obispo, Calif.; Oxford, Mass.; and Newtown, Conn. (The letters were first reported by DSLreports.com.)
Charter said it will start testing the system within 30 days and will make a decision whether to roll it out to its 2.8 million Internet customers a few months after that.
Great. Now ALL my pop-ups
Great. Now ALL my pop-ups will be porn.
BoingBoing Wannabes
Yet another instance of LISNews posting items that really have nothing to do with libraries, librarians or information science. If you’re going to stretch and assume the whole world is in the “information” part, why not also include items about Brad and Angelina or how to microwave vegetables?
Nothing to do with libraries?
Library internet connections have to connect to something. If a rural library gets a business hook-up from Charter, for example, then this is a very real concern for any librarian who has to choose from among sometimes limited choices how their library will reach the Internet. The question then becomes what to put first: providing access to the infrastructure that is the Internet or protecting patron privacy. As the original piece did not discriminate between consumer and business accounts, I would be hard-pressed to say that this has really nothing to do with libraries at all.
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Stephen Kellat, Host, LISTen
Nothing to do with libraries?
Agreed. There’s hardly anything related to the Internet that isn’t important to libraries.
Some of us even live there. 😉
This will, however, put a big crimp in casual while-the-spouse-is-out porn surfing. THAT will have interesting consequences. Might move some of those Internet users to the library ….
thanks for story
I’m a Charter subscriber (cable & high speed internet) and connect to the internet wirelessly at home via my laptop (my Desktop PC is the main hub but it’s frustratingly old/slow). I got a letter from Charter explaining this; I may switch to Verizon DSL in the near future as a result–I don’t know yet.
LISNews is not a BoingBoing Wannabe…If they start posting copious articles on Steampunk realia THEN it would be a BoingBoing wannabe… 😉
An article on descriptive Cataloging Steampunk Realia, on the other hand…