Comments on: Is Comcast selling your clickstream? Audio & Transcript.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I think the difference is, in the case of AOL people understood what was sold. For the IPS people doesn’t understand what is a click stream and they don’t realize the importance of this information.

By: David Cancel

David Cancel — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Stan,

I wanted to make a couple of clarifications to my talk at the Open Data Conference.

1. I did not mean to imply that Comcast is licensing clickstream data. I have no idea what their practices are. I took Seth’s Comcast example as a strictly hypothetical example. I apologize to everyone if that was confusing, I can see how it may have been now.

2. My “it’s beyond that” reply to the AOL question was meant to highlight that “clickstream” data in any form (access logs, etc) is much “wider” (breadth) than search query data.

3. I did not mean to imply there was some “market” price for clickstream data. Again I apologize for the confusion I may have caused, I should have spent more time qualifying my reply on pricing.

Thanks again,
David

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I am absolutely outraged, but I guess that’s only for my being European. I simply can not understand how anyone with some common sense could get the idea the data I produce by surfing could possibly belong to the access provider. It’s probably containing more extremely private information and clues about me, my habits, my employer, my banks than my creditcard records or even my bankstatements. And Comcast puts me at risk by selling this FOR 40 CENTS?
In this country, everybody seems to be paranoid about terrorism and the power of government - which does virtually know nothing about each individual. Then again, for exactly that reason there’s a thing like “identity theft” which in countries with a decent policy of registration simply doesn’t exist. I feel a lot better about what the administration in my homeland Switzerland knows about me than what profit-oriented companies without any control whatsoever not only know about me, but just simply sell to whoever offers them money for it.
Looking forward to the class action when some clever lawyer finds the first few victims of identy theft who can prove it happened because of their clickstreams beeing sold.

By: Brendan Lally

Brendan Lally — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Well if u don’t read the T&C’s when u sign up don’t be surprised if there is something in there u don’t like.

Most of them are nasty and bit like the software licence from Microsoft etc.. where it says u don’t own it, u just rent it and we can take it away at any time, also you absolve us from anything that might happen with the software including where it doesn’t work, has bugs, gives blue screen of death ….
u get the idea.

No not surprised with the comcast stuff as well.

If u really want 2 be “of no value 2 them” run an internal proxy (onion type) on your PC/internal network. Its easy (yah! right!)

Lal