[AusNOG] Australian ISP's Selling Browsing Data

[Nikolai Lusan]

Hi,

I actually used to work for a firm that basically did exactly this. The
data was used for marketing site comparison stuff. Basically they had
collectors in the networks of various ISP's and would take a stream of
packets destined for port 80, identify the end user account (mostly
just demographic information) and the site being visited. Clients could
then look generate graphs showing traffic to their site compared to
competitors sites, including demographic/location information on where
it the traffic was coming from. They started out by buying, and then
processing, squid logs from ISP's and then moved to in network
capturing of data. 

This company still exists in another form, and when I left they had
arrangements with ISP's in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, US, UK,
and we moving into other areas of Europe.

This kind of thing has been going on for much longer than people would
like to admit.

-- 
Nikolai Lusan <nikolai at lusan.id.au>
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