Using DPI: Behavioral targeting and privacy

AT&T and Verizon have pledged not to track online users for behavioral targeting unless the user opts in, a move that we believe is being taken to help position both companies for later use of DPI for more direct user surveillance.

In fact, without DPI it is difficult for someone other than a portal player to track users at all. Network operators like AT&T and Verizon, like other operators worldwide, have been either considering or actually trialing technology to sniff packet streams to determine what sites a user is visiting.

Congressional hearings in the U.S., FCC comments, and EU regulatory trends all seem to be favoring DPI regulation of DPI to obtain user data, and in both cases, the “at the minimum, opt-in” position has been proposed by regulators. The current move is thus a step toward linking opt-in with “tracking”, not as much to justify current tracking but to pre-justify a later decision to use DPI. We don’t think it will be that simple. The FCC tells us that without permission of both websites and users it might well be illegal to snoop broadband Internet traffic.