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Comment by veeragoni | Hacker News Reader

The big thing that techies on hacker news need to realize here is what this company is trying to do by collecting all the data with so called "deep packet inspection". they provide data at the cost of stealing all your activities on phone irrespective of app to do big data analytics. same thing that Facebook wanted to do via internet.org. It becomes easy this way. for them data is the new oil[1]!

[1] http://in.reuters.com/article/reliance-telecoms-jio-idINKCN1...

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It was also reported earlier [0]:

  Privacy: An unnamed Jio executive mentioned “deep packet
  inspection” to Reuters, saying: “It’s called deep packet
  inspection, and what you can do with the analytics of that is
  mind-boggling,” he said, referring to a practice that digs into
  “packets” of data created by computers for efficiency, mining
  them for information. If this is happening and Jio is accessing
  data packets to develop patterns of user data consumption, this
  is a major privacy violation. The company deserves to be taken
  to court for this, as much as the India needs a privacy law.

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/reliances-ambani-lays-out-plan-f...

No, Facebook wanted you to just access Facebook and a few other Facebook Approved services.

https://info.internet.org/en/story/free-basics-from-internet...

Every website is routed through Facebook servers. They created a pseudo-standard as opposed to standard HTML and only the websites with that would be allowed onto the program. Imagine if Google comes over and says "AMP" loads faster, takes less data is better but, is a subset of HTML spec & "Google"-sponsored format; So, we will give free internet access but, only websites which adapt to our specifications would be allowed and not everyone. You either provide internet access or no. Facebook could have gone with tiered system in regard to Free basics as in provide free data only for about "X" GB. Most of India consumes internet in terms of amount of data. They didn't go about this approach but, rather wanted to get on with providing free internet but, collect data of the website visit information, hava user analytics.

Another important consideration is that Facebook only allowed any website to be in it after initial backlash. Initially, it only allowed websites deemed necessary by Facebook like "facebook", "messenger", "groups" and "Google. No way for users or website owners to say they'd like a wesbite "xyz" as part of program. This was and is an attempt by Facebook to create a walled gatway to internet by Facebook masked by their philanthrophic arm.

I'm not clear as to what insights will DPI provide once data is encrypted. What am I missing ?

You are missing that also meta data such as the connected host, the time spent on a connected host, time of access, data volume transferred etc is also valuable. Also, they know the subscriber pretty well to begin with. Also their location.

Also, lots of sites are not encrypted, still.

Not much for encrypted data, but they can still get metadata out of it (which site you visited, how much traffic was exchanged relative to other sites you visited, what times of the day you visited, which days of the week you visited, usage patterns, etc.). For example, if you have a pattern of visiting say, an Amazon store, that information could be useful to have rivals of Amazon to target you with ads or special offers, even if they cannot find what exactly you did on Amazon.

The voice calls are also on LTE (VoLTE), and a similar DPI scheme could be used to get a lot out of that by recording and inspecting content and metadata. Legality aside, if they're intent on mining data, there are millions of people who wouldn't even know what http vs. https means or to use end-to-end encrypted apps for calls, etc. (or probably not care as much). I'm not implying that nobody will care, because there may be another prominent movement (savetheinternet) like the one that helped block Facebook's Free Basics initiative through campaigns and well crafted letters to the authorities.

> Not much for encrypted data, but they can still get metadata out of it (which site you visited, how much traffic was exchanged relative to other sites you visited, what times of the day you visited, which days of the week you visited, usage patterns, etc.). For

Just use a VPN?

Well, yes, but unfortunately, of the billion+ people here in India, I doubt if a significant percentage has even heard of a VPN, leave alone the matter of knowing what it does or knowing how to go about getting and setting one up.

Or about paying for one

Do you have a source that says Facebook was planning on doing deep packet inspection?

I think what the comment meant was Facebook was trying to "steal all your (online) activities on phone irrespective of app to do big data analytics. "

This would have been trivial via the Free Basics program because Facebook would have been the gatekeeper for all the online activities. No deep packet inspection necessary. Just have the users agree to having all their interactions with those carefully selected 'partners' allowed to be used by FB ...for you know, providing better service and improving content.

At one point at least, internet.org wasn't supporting HTTPS (see https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/05/05/facebook-opens-u...).

Doesn't prove anything, but not supporting tls makes me think they want to inspect the traffic.

Isn't this something that every ISP would be able to do? Or are you saying they have something special? If so, how?

Sure, except the problem is "the last mile". 4g solves this by virtue, and they're offering it for free for this advantage.

No not free, free for first 3-4 months.

Doesn't Comcast do deep packet inspection? it throttles certain protocols/services (torrents is one example)

If this is true, it must be region specific. My Comcast connection doesn't throttle anything, torrents included, and has never failed to get approximately 110% of the speed I pay for.

For a moment, I thought VPN's were the answer to this, for privacy-conscious people in India, but do such VPN's exist that are financially accessible to people from India that don't go through ISP's that do the same thing?

> for privacy-conscious people in India

Privacy conscious in India? It wouldn't even go up to as high as 0.000001%

OperaVPN is free on iPhone - I started using it recently and it's pretty great.

They're surely mining your data. Why else would they do this ?

I have no love lost for this guy - or his company - but to be fair, why can this not be thought of as a strategy to acquire (a mother lode of) future (paying) users? Kind of bait and switch? I would say the investment of 3 or 4 months of free service is negligible as compared to the long-term revenues that this strategy would bring in.

Any benefit/s derived via possible deep data mining would only be the icing on the cake.

And given that he and the PM are buddies, one has to wonder if this is India's own NSA masquerading as something empowering and progressive.

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