I prefer to conceptualize privacy as a right to be respected and not a commodity to be bought and sold.
Bruce Schneier
February 24, 2015
AT&T Charging Customers to Not Spy on Them
[SoWhatDidYouExpect comments, ‘Replace “prefer to conceptualize” with “DEMAND”.’—Joe]
My ISP was doing that deep packet inspection — and then it was replacing ads with ads they were receiving a cut on. (In other words, they could replace all of your gun advertising with ads of their choosing.) They put their ads on an overlay so I would never see your ads. They swore this was legal.
Anyway, it really pissed me off. I thought I had contracted a virus at first, since their system also creates hyperlinks where none exist on the original product. I contacted my antivirus company (I have guaranteed virus removal) and they spent about eight hours on my computer (remote) trying to get rid of it. They couldn’t remove it. It popped up in every browser, even browsers they installed. It was coming from somewhere else in the system, outside of my computer.
Since this is a rather long story, I’ll just get down to what I want to say: Your ISP has the ability to totally screw you and everyone else over without you even realizing it. I found a report on Reddit and a couple of other places where people have experienced the same thing I did.
Amazing. An ISP that pulled such a stunt would lose my business in an instant, and I would work hard to put it out of business entirely.
This sort of thing is why Tor is a good idea. (I use it regularly, though not for all of my web browsing.)