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Comment by ereyes01 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, ISPs can snoop on you to a degree, but I don't see how it's worse than Facebook or Google. ISPs have to work around widespread (and growing) encryption, while Google/Facebook have your _actual_ data... plus, they know way more about you in minute detail via their mobile apps and devices. My home internet is VPN'ed and unless my ISP is expending undue effort on monitoring me, it can't see much detail about what I do on the Internet. However, Google/Facebook break all the security layers because we explicitly _trust_ them with all our data. Unless something fundamentally changes (maybe via net neutrality somehow allowing ISPs to penalize encrypted traffic or something), I don't see how Facebook/Google don't run away with all the power here.

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I agree with you, but there's also a business model aspect I think you're missing. Your ISP might be interested in monetizing your personal data to add to the ways they make money, but for companies like Google and Facebook, making money from your personal data is basically their entire business model.

Given enough opposition, Verizon, Comcast, etc, could strongly embrace personal data privacy and still continue as companies. Yes, they'd lose a business opportunity, but they still make a lot of money selling you internet access and that wouldn't go away. The same is not really true of companies like Google or Facebook. Collecting and making money off your personal data is the foundation of their business. Strongly protecting your privacy would require them to change their entire way of making money.

I think you could argue either way whether Google or Verizon has more ability to spy on you, but Google absolutely has a stronger business motivation to collect your data than Verizon does.

> The same is not really true of companies like Google or Facebook. Collecting and making money off your personal data is the foundation of their business. Strongly protecting your privacy would require them to change their entire way of making money.

For Facebook maybe, but Google was a large and successful business before its 'personalized' targeting was really that advanced. AdWords ran for a full four years without any kind of search personalization, and up until 2012, it was possible to turn off search personalization entirely. Google made $37bn in 2011. [1] Google Display Network, the area of Google's business that would most obviously be disrupted by a move toward strong user privacy, only makes a fraction of that still. [2]

While I completely agree that Facebook would struggle without behavioral targeting, being able to buy ads on a PPC basis for users with 'intent' will always be a valuable product for advertisers, regardless of targeting.

[1] https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/01/23/google-revenue...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266245/advertising-reven...

Indeed. Google never really had to go this "ultra-targeted ads" approach. Perhaps it's the difference between Google making $30 billion in profit a year and "only" $10 billion in profit a year, and the difference between them mainly sticking to the search business and them paying for all of these failed projects like the $12 billion Motorola acquisition, Boston Dynamics, (even Nest, I'd say), and so on.

But as a company it never really needed to do those. Heck, Google doesn't even need to be in the self-driving business.

I think it's a failure of competition and anti-trust laws that companies are allowed to grow this big to get their fingers into all the pies out there. The only reason they even go into all of these different industries is because they've made so much money they don't know what to do with it.

Sooner or later we're going to have to deal with this rampant increase in monopolies and we'll have to take some drastic measures to do it. We may even have to break-up companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, Comcast, Disney, Goldman Sachs, and others, because they were never supposed to turn into such large conglomerates. The fact that they did was a failure of competition laws to stop them from growing this big in the first place.

Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon are now allowed to spy on you, then buy media and ad companies, and then use that data to manipulate you for political purposes so you end-up voting for the candidates that will help them further consolidate their power. We should have put a stop to that along the way.

Motorola wasn't the failure you think it was. That was, as I understand it, about patent acquisition. They got what they want and then dumped what they didn't.

Per Thiel's "theory" (as seen in Zero to One) most of Google's "failures" are a cover for their search monopoly.

GDN is not the only piece of business that'll be impacted by strong user privacy. Search and YT will also be impacted, given there's ability to buy ads based on users being in-market for a product/service etc [1]

You can also be targeted with ads based on emails you receive in Gmail - it was possible to target down to keywords in emails, but that was discontinued. Now, the emails you receive, domains your getting them from etc. influence signals, that puts you into an 'audience' that can be used for targeting across the Google network.

Without the ability to do targeting, or personalization, as Google calls it, their business will fall apart. Everything they do is geared to collecting more information about users to improve "personalization" - from Google Assistant, to Google Home [2]. It's so advanced that your experience (results) on their platfrom, especially within Search -- will be unique to you.

Google will fight alongside AT&T, Comcast, etc to protect their business model, in-fact Google is trying to reach their ranks with the 5G war [3]

[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-adwords-in-market-audien...

[2] https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/864293485439893505

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-29/google-le... - (search for: Spectrum Access System )

There was an ISP called NetZero that used this business model to provide free dial up and I think later on, free DSL in the 2000s. So this isn't a new concept, except what everyone is saying they (the ISPs) are now doing it without any kind of exchange of value apparently.

Oh, man, I remember NetZero. Hadn’t thought about them in ages. There was another similar company called Juno, iirc. I almost miss the days of free dialup services—where I explicitly chose to see ads in exchange for a free service, and the company was upfront that this was the exchange being performed.

I used both of those services and it is really amazing that the quality of ads from Google and Facebook 16+ years later is pretty much the same as NetZero/juno

I agree with you, but there is one key difference...you are paying your ISP for the service. Google, FB, etc. provide free service offerring in exchange for your data.

If ISPs are going to monetize customers traffic then their terms of use better damn well call that out.

There is potential here for new business model for privacy based ISPs (ex: think duckduckgo for ISP) where customers pay a premium for such an offering.

Do you need an ISP? How about a preconfigured router / modem that uses a privacy-minded DNS + VPS? My parents and most of my friends for example wouldn't know how to do any of that.

Mind you many of them have no idea, but as their goto I could make a smart recommendation and they would likely follow.

Oh! And package it with a better than average 2FA. Maybe a Yubikey or similar.

More or less sec in a box. Perhaps not 100% complete and bulletproof but better than the current situation.

bahnhof.se is an example of this. (swedish isp).

No there isn’t. Where in the world can you select your ISP? in a meaningful way.

Not the U.S, that's for sure.

But from what I've heard practically anywhere in Europe, and definitely in Japan.

You have Internet choice in most of Europe if you count DSL, but people in the U.S. tend to dismiss DSL out of hand. Excluding DSL, in German you've got cable ISPs which largely don't compete in the same geographic area, and almost no fiber penetration. France is similar, though with more fiber (but still less than in the U.S.).

yeah in Japan you have major net providers and there is even a difference between the network you rent and the ISP. For example you can be on a NTT fiber line but use a different ISP on that line.

> For example you can be on a NTT fiber line but use a different ISP on that line

as an american living in a major city, this exceeds my wildest dreams of internet service.

It's the difference between a regulated pro-consumer free market, and a lobbyist controlled market presenting a duopoly as a free market.

It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful.

The difference is that NTT lost money for years offering wholesale fiber below cost: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.489... (pages 11, 16). It could do that because it has a national near-monopoly in the wholesale space (it get some money from every subscriber, no matter what ISP they use), Japan's economy offers much lower returns than the U.S.'s (making low return infrastructure investments relatively more attractive), and NTT is 1/3 owned by the government (which ordered it to deploy fiber, regardless of profits).

> It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful.

Well regulation can be harmful if it protects the incumbents and prevents the introduction of new players. Lobbyists are usually pushing for more regulation, not the opposite.

It's not about regulation or not regulation, it's about what kind of regulation makes sense for a free market.

If this is a serious question in Kiev I had a choice of 4 high speed providers at a cost of about 1/10 what equivalent xfinity service is costing me here :)

Your random eastern european country? My apartment complex is wired by at least 2 ISPs. If I don't feel like using any of them, LTE-for-home boxes are available for reasonable price with reasonable data caps from a couple other ISPs.

pretty much everywhere in europe.

In India, most metro have 2-3 broadband providers, and most of country have 4-6 mobile internet provider.

I have three major ISPs available where I live that can over 100+ meg service.

Four here (Portuguese city near Lisbon) offering at least 250mbps.

For the layman user (likely 99%+ of these ISP user populations), using an ISP essentially provides near-entire browser history to them, at least to the granularity of domain name.

A surprising number of sites (and/or assets, images, etc) still don't use TLS, and so for those it's also possible for an ISP to understand what the user was reading/accessing.

Even for sites which do support TLS, if the ISP hypothetically had a partnership with a single data broker / advertiser which was also on the page, it's likely not hard to have a pretty precise idea of their interests/viewing.

You're right that Google and Facebook will continue to have very narrow and precise information about people's daily lives; it's simultaneously true that ISPs will continue to have broad & ongoing profiling information across any touchpoints as people use the internet.

I mostly agree with you. From my perspective the data that Facebook has on me is far better than anything my ISP could have collected thus-far. I am in an area where I have more than one option for high speed internet and it is a pain to change but not even close to the amount of pain I would experience by deleting Facebook and Instagram. Doing that would cause fundamental changes to my social life. None of my friends are even aware that I switched ISPs last year.

I think if the article was written in the spirit of "watch out for the ISPs too" instead of "the ISPs are so much worse" I would have been more onboard.

I think it's a bit apples and oranges: all my traffic with low resolution or just my social traffic in high resolution. I don't clearly see one being far more dangerous/valuable than the other.

Facebook and Google are not repositories to which you entrust your data for private safekeeping. The point of Facebook is to communicate with other people. The point of Google is to interact with shared repository of knowledge that learns from its own utilization. There is inherently a multi-party interest in everything Google or Facebook has about you, except for maybe never-shared Google Docs.

Bank vault analogues for private data do exist: iCloud, Dropbox, Crashplan, etc. If “your data” needs to leave your physical possession, that’s the sort of service it should go to.

iCloud: Apple has the keys :(

Dropbox: Dropbox has the keys :(

Crashplan: I have the keys :)

> Crashplan: I have the keys :)

Do you really? They offer a web interface with access to your data. Do you enter the encryption keys when you access the web interface, or do you enter a username and password which then provides access to the encryption keys?

In that situation, who really has the keys?

IIRC, with Crashplan (RIP) you get a choice of whether to encrypt everything with a local key, in which case you're SOL if you lose it, or to encrypt with a key known to Crashplan, in which case you can reset your password and they can see your data. That seems like a reasonable trade-off to me, where different users will make different choices.

Crashplan still works fine, you just have to get the business-branded version.

Google doesn't need to break encryption for other reasons too. It has JavaScript execution access and thus access to all the client side data on at least the half of the top 1mil. websites on the internet.

It's easily blockable for people who care, but still many don't, and for those people it makes all the pretty transport encrytpion a sham.

Seriously, companies afford third parties JavaScript execution on pages where they expect me to enter CC or other sensitive info. Half of the web at this point is a joke when it comes to security and privacy.

I, too, use encrypted VPN, but we are just a minority. Many people use the services provided as-is without taking any extra measures, and I think that those are the people more likely to be influenced by the influencers anyway.

We, the ones that they'll have to spend undue effort to sniff out a profile about, are not targets to them. We are much too resistant to it that we have gone all through the effort of setting up a private VPN with good encryption.

Whilst a VPN is an important and arguably now necessary way to protect yourself on the internet, it's use in practice is very far from a sliver bullet. Ignoring the somewhat inevitable problems of latency and bandwidth - much of the internet appears hostile to VPNs. A significant number or sites either don't work at all, or are a pain to use.

For example

* On NordVPN through US servers you can't access Amazon (!) Although through Canadian servers you are ok.

* Costco, Apple store, Business Insider, YouTube, google, netflex, dell, consumer reports, ebay - either don't work, or are a pain to make work

* On PureVPN you can't send email - until you have your domain whitelisted

* On PureVPN it's a crap shoot if you get a connection

More detail on experiences with PureVPN and NordVPN are here..

https://www.toytheory.com/?p=295

https://www.toytheory.com/?p=273

https://www.toytheory.com/?p=321

(edit: formatting)

> I, too, use encrypted VPN, but we are just a minority.

You're right that VPN usage is technically a minority [1], but it is well beyond fringe usage.

[1] https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/304927/Downloads/VPN-Usage-Ar...

Just wondering, what makes you trust your VPN provider more than your ISP?

I use DigitalOcean as my VPN provider and make my connections to there over IPSEC. I did not set the server up myself alone, but used the Algo VPN [1] script to do it for me. With this setup, I have two things to be concerned about:

1- I did not audit the script myself, and they may have injected various malware to the VPN server it spun up during the setup. I am not concerned enough to not trust them, but I could just read the script thoroughly to eliminate the necessity for trust.

2- DigitalOcean has the access to hardware, so it might be doing whatever while I am not looking, and I just never look. Similarly, I could monitor the activity on the server to assume some control.

I chose DO for being the cheapest ($5/month).

[1] https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

It's more VPN'ing into your own router and trusting your own ISP more than some random free wifi provider.

I am the same as you, but I worry the opposite. Using an encrypted VPN in a sea of unencrypted traffic paints a big target on you that says "Im doing things I don't want you to see". You can bet they are working on / can already decrypt and some three letter agency is targeting specifically VPN traffic.

I don'ẗ think you have to worry, I have never had a job that didn't require encrypted vpn to access the internal networks away from the office.

The only company I know of that puts everything in public so to speak is google.

So VPN traffic is very common.

Good to know , thanks

Hopefully no more than using an envelope instead of a postcard marks you as hiding something.

There are other privacy problems with wireless hotspots too. A new example: you can't log in to Starbucks' wifi (via Google) without verifying a real email address through Experian's API. (Open the browser console and watch the requests -- see if you can use a fake email address.) Who knows where all that data is going.

Most hotspot providers are probably tracking your physical locations by MAC address, which can be linked with other data. It looks like Peet's recently started doing that as well.

> A new example: you can't log in to Starbucks' wifi (via Google) without verifying a real email address through Experian's API. (Open the browser console and watch the requests -- see if you can use a fake email address.)

I used a fake address yesterday without issue.

A fake address meaning one that you don't own, or a fake address meaning one that doesn't exist at all? You might have entered someone else's real email account that exists in Experian's databases, which could be another serious problem waiting to happen.

Couple devil's advocate points on what ISPs can do to get encrypted traffic, since they are your network gateway there is more instilled trust:

- ISP offered 'apps'. Get people to agree to an install of some monitoring app for some [insert random marketing benefit] from ISP. Maybe if you install the app you get more data cap space etc and they can monitor browser access. Further, install this in known apps or as add-ons on setup for other apps.

- ISP offered 'VPN client' that again, gives some cheaper monetary benefit like more data cap space or more speed 'free', strips out other advertising or tracking as a benefit.

- ISP offered 'email client' that does all of the above.

- Check for subsequent request after page loads to known ad networks and replace with their own in HTTPS

- ISPs like you said may start throttling encrypted content down, or charging extra to allow it.

- ISP level proxy MITM, modem customization for 'fast lanes' that are actually slow lanes.

- DNS level data collection not to inject but to sell marketing profiles via metadata and correlate with other data from apps.

Since ISPs are your 'gateway' to the internet and you pay them, most people assume trust and privacy, most don't know they bribed their way into the tracking/ad business, many didn't know cable tv modems had mics either. With that assumption of trust since people are paying them, they'll more easily fall for any of the possible attack/tracking vectors listed and more probably.

With the ISP privacy protections removed [1], my guess is most ISPs, due to lack of competition, end up more like hotel wifi where tracking/injection is the norm [2] as it is completely legal now. With the removal of privacy protections and net neutrality, we have killed the pristine, non tracked, private gateways to the internet we cherish.

[1] https://www.flake.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2017/3/flake-i...

[2] https://medium.com/@nicklum/my-hotel-wifi-injects-ads-does-y...

This makes sense, though I don't see how various "carrots" like faux-value-add spyware will penetrate the market significantly, since they likely can't beat Google/Facebook in actual delivered value. Also, spyware / crapware already has a pretty bad rep, and will likely be flagged by system scanning tools on traditional PCs (maybe not mobile devices though).

Your other points about how they can (ab)use their position as the gateway to chip away the effect of encryption by laying various roadblocks (I guess the proverbial "stick" in the "carrot/stick" trope) seems like it could have some teeth if the ISPs really doubled down on this strategy. I expect they will have to overcome significant controversy in order to be successful on a mass scale (but we'll see I guess).

Encryption has gotten much easier and more widespread in recent years, and is growing. If the ISPs had really focused on attacking it a few years ago, they could've nipped their surveillance competition in the bud, but now it's a harder problem for them to deal with. Not 100% insurmountable, as parent explained.

> Encryption has gotten much easier and more widespread in recent years, and is growing.

When you only have a handful of large ISPs where AT&T has been known to split your data to share with the NSA and authorities, that is dangerous thinking [1].

> Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency that commenced operations in 2003 and was exposed in 2006

That was over a decade ago, I am sure by now they have privilege to lots of that data and technology.

There was a #deletefacebook movement which proves that you can get rid of Facebook and people use it by choice. There cannot be a #deleteISP movement as that is the 'trusted' network gateway you can't route around.

All it takes is scaring people who use ISPs to allow in more monitoring 'for your safety' or 'more data cap space' or 'faster internet' or 'lower costs', they can legally sell that data now so there is an incentive to do these things. There is a reason they lobbied for this right and removal of net neutrality, it wasn't to play nice.

Hotel wifi like ISPs here we come.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

>while Google/Facebook have your _actual_ data...

Is it _your_ data, or is it _their_ data? I'm asking in both the literal (based on terms of service, etc) and the more abstract way? Obviously, for the latter, it is a combination. I wish the narrative was discussed with that in mind. Most of what I tend to see is a widespread assumption that the user owns the data, and has given companies like Facebook very limited powers, and that somehow Facebook is breaking that trust. That narrative is, IMO, rubbish. We gave them very broad powers, and the users should accept the consequences.

>However, Google/Facebook break all the security layers because we explicitly _trust_ them with all our data.

If we explicitly _trust_ them, then are they _breaking_ anything? It just seems silly when we explicitly say (as many of my friends have said in the past) "I don't care what Facebook does with my information" and then we talk about it as if they are doing something wrong (using words like "break").

When I give my bank all my money with the understanding that they can hold it, as well as lend it, we don't refer to it as "breaking" anything.

If you use a VPN then you have just moved all the access that your ISP had to your VPN service provider. It doesn't really change much.

Technically not but in terms of company practices or legal environment it can change a lot.

For example, are $US_ISP and F-Secure in the same bucket in practice?

I think using a VPN actually increases risk, because it makes you suspicious.

Nowadays, not really, plenty of people use them to avoid geo blocking.

Plenty like under 0,1% ? That doesn’t make it less of a target.

It's hard to get reliable numbers, but Global Web Index puts it at about 5% of the US internet users, so over 10 million people.

That's an absurd number for users of any kind of geo-unblocking DNS service, especially in the US where you barely need it.

>but I don't see how it's worse than Facebook or Google.

They are worse because you are forced to use an ISP if you wish to access the internet.

>However, Google/Facebook break all the security layers because we explicitly _trust_ them with all our data.

Nobody informed who cares about their privacy ever entrusted Google or Facebook with any personal information.

ISPs have your credit card number and home address. They can link your online and offline lives.

Google and Facebook have detailed social graph and search query, but your ISP could piece together a lot of that information by tracking your DNS queries, unencrypted HTTP traffic, email if you use their mail servers, and offline information.

Anyone who's ever bought an Android app has also given Google their credit card number and home address.

Also, Facebook and Google can both determine your home address by where your phone (and it's location tracking) idles for several hours a day.

Google buys access to credit card providers so they can link the ads displayed to you with purchases you make, to report how effective the ads are to the advertisers.

Why would ISP have credit card number? I pay my ISP with old good wire transfer.

> wire transfer

Which will include everything interesting about your identity. It literally is equivalent to using a debit or credit card

My ISP already knows my name. Nothing else gets sent along. My bank account number is not useful unless they get my history from my bank. Which is not likely to happen.

There's no 3rd party payment processor involved that could collect a bunch of my activity and then sell it to someone. With wire transfers, they'd have to go to everybody who I'm paying and ask for the data. Which is much less likely.

FB sees you on FB.

The others can follow you everywhere. They know where you live. They know who you phone. They know who phones you.

It's even. Death by drowning, or death by car crash is still death.

The fact that Uncle Sam isn't concerned about the intrusions tells us whose side he's on.

I think you underestimate the prevalence of the like button. Facebook runs code in your browser on lot of other web pages out there. Probably second only to Google.

Yes. I agree. That said I can't remember the last time I liked something outside FB.

Liking a comment has to be tough to surmise "intent."

p.s. fwiw I'm getting to the point where I'm going to like and follow things just to leave a false trail. Can't hurt.

The fact that typically my FB feed is so shite only tells me they have a long way to go before they analyze the signals I provide them.

You don't have to explicitly like anything for FB to track your usage on practically every website that has a Facebook button. The fact that the site displays the like button in your browser is enough to give Facebook whatever info Facebook wants about your activity on the site.

Ok. Fair enough.

But there are borwser extensions to block that, yes?

Note: That's not a tit for tat counter attack but a question. Tia

If your isp colludes with advertisers, they can associate the vpn traffic using traffic analysis.

Can you explain how this works?

I don't know if it's being done.

The web requests your browser sends to ad networks (or other colluding web properties) from vpn exit addresses, when analyzed as an aggregate, can be identified based on their time/length signatures. These would be correlated by the isp with traffic between vpn termination addresses and customer addresses. ISP can resolve a customer address to person.

Advertisers could add unique timing and size features to make this easier.

They know the address they provide service to.

Several years ago I joined a stealth-mode spinoff of a large telecom equipment manufacturer, and worked on deep-packet inspection (DPI) on 10Gb/s fiber-optic networks. The initial motivation for the project was a desire by telecom companies to obtain personally identifiable information and profiles for targeted advertising, and as we learned, a number of other interesting use cases, like reducing customer churn. At the NOCs there were a number of various servers in racks that were getting a feed of raw traffic for a variety of purposes. It wasn't a free-for-all, but it was eye-opening. I recall reading through a Cisco router manual for example (not the company I worked for) and seeing its port-mirroring capabilities blatantly promoted as a means for customer profiling and targeted advertising.

Outside of the telecom industry itself there was quite a bit of resistance to this sort of thing, and we had to go before the US Congress to explain what we were up to. Profiling for the sake of profiling was not smooth sailing, but if it was for the purpose of "security" then it was more or less a free pass. The forcus of our DPI technology turned to the task of network-based threat detection as its primary raison d'être, with customer profiling being an opt-in service by which users could obtain the security service in exchange for targeted ads.

In the years since, I don't expect that Telecom's desire to be much more than a "dumb pipe" has diminished in the least. They view the traffic they carry on their networks to be their property, in a way. They feel entitled to inspect it, throttle it, slice and dice it any conceivable way they can to maximise their profits. Its one of the reasons I quit.

Imagine the US postal service steaming open every letter and opening every package that went through their system, so they could plug your mailbox with targeted special offers or increase the delivery fees for certain things. Its all similar BS with ISPs, but it's all techie stuff and heavily lobbied so the public gets bamboozled.

You raise a really good point about wide-spread encryption being an impediment to ISP profiling. But there is a LOT you can surmise from user traffic even if you don't know the exact content of the encrypted payloads. Just analyzing IP addresses and times can reveal a ton of information about a person. My first patent [US20100161795] was in fact a NAT session detection and tracking technique to identify and track individual users within a household through TCP/IP analysis. Using this technique someone could get a pretty clear picture of how many people were in a household, their ages, genders, interests and patterns of activity, even without delving into the http payload of the packets. We didn't, but this kind of thing is most definitely possible, and I wouldn't trust other shady entities not to do it.

I was hoping to read through the comments and find someone would correct you, but it seems everyone is under the same false belief.

Encryption doesn't matter.

Automated deep packet and encrypted packet inspection is burgeoning with advances that put the single-actor work-arounds to shame.

1). Your ISP knows your traffic is encrypted. It knows what cipher and protocol you're using, and its routing is not protocol-agnostic.

2). Your ISP knows beyond "mostly confident" the type of files your packets contain. If you don't keep your connection open and use any of the public encryption methods, your ISP will know exactly what you've downloaded to a reasonable degree.

3). HTTPS is only as good as all the different pieces combined (browser, root CA, server, site, client). And if one of those goes bad, it's worthless.

4). If you use encryption heavily, you're already flagged.

5). If you don't use your ISP's CDN, you're already flagged.

6). If you connect to any other site besides Google, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, or Instagram your aggregate data will be quickly analyzed and compared with a threat table, and appropriately flagged.

7). Traffic analysis is trivial when you're the one routing the traffic.

Google is Dunning Kruger evil. ISPs are "pick up that can" evil. The lack of serious developments in HTTPS are "see no evil" stupid. The thought that HTTPS is anything but a red hearing is "Ivan the Fool" stupid.

>If you connect to any other site besides Google, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, or Instagram your aggregate data will be quickly analyzed and compared with a threat table, and appropriately flagged.

Huh? What are you talking about?

>If you use encryption heavily, you're already flagged.

>If you don't use your ISP's CDN, you're already flagged.

What types of encryption? Since when did ISPs make users use a CDN? Again, I don’t get what you’re saying.

Sources and more information would be greatly appreciated.

The grandparent doesn't say this specifically, but I've long suspected that a middleman adversary can identify, with high accuracy, which top-1000 website you are accessing (even through a VPN) based on the timing and bandwidth signature of the encrypted traffic. Probably to a lot more detail if they gather and analyze longer-term traffic pattern data.

They can certainly tell whether you're using streaming video with this type of analysis.

If people start using VPNs en masse, ISPs and/or other interested actors will develop this technology, if they have not already. (I would guess it already has been, albeit perhaps not widely deployed.)

If the ISP is the same as the ad network, or a data broker with one (and some are, see: Verizon Wireless), they can then link your IP address to a cookie-based profile. (Yes, there are counter-measures there, like disabling third-party cookies. And there are countermeasures to that, like browser fingerprinting.)

This sounds about right. I came to most of these conclusions myself after trying to build a secure personal VPN . Oh what a fool I was.

> ISPs have to work around widespread (and growing) encryption, while Google/Facebook have your _actual_ data.

Today. But in terms of risk moving forward, I think ISPs are way worse. Two reasons:

1) I really can choose not to use Google/Facebook. There exist very solid, privacy-respecting alternatives for every service these two companies offer. It's a matter of consumer choice.

This is not the case for ISPs. If my (one) local "high-speed" ISP demands that I install a new root cert so they can MITM all my traffic, my choices are to a) capitulate, or b) find a way to live with very low-speed DSL/dial-up.

Monopoly power backed up by a vast network of cables has way more staying power than monopoly power backed up by social network effects (FB) or superior software offerings (Gmail).

2) You might argue that history demonstrates we don't have to worry about ISPs demanding to MITM customer traffic. But Historically, ISPs weren't incentivized to snoop because of regulatory barriers that prevented collection/use of data for advertising purposes. In the case of US ISPs, changes in regulator landscape suggest that past behavior doesn't guarantee future behavior.

You just admitted you do have the same choice for ISPs: You can choose to live with a degraded option/experience.

In the same way, many would argue leaving Google or Facebook requires they give up on key features and benefits of living on the Internet. Like, you know, talking to your friends.

> If my (one) local "high-speed" ISP demands that I install a new root cert so they can MITM all my traffic

I don't see what sense it makes to worry about that before it actually happens. Especially when there's no reason to believe it is going to happen.

See (2) from my post. Also, from another top-level comment ATM:

>>I recently received a "terms of service" update from Comcast, with the notification that they can now "monitor and record anything going through the network. Including, but not limited to: audio recording, video recording, ..."

I mean, look, if they're not going to do it, then why did they lobby so hard and successfully to do it?

Frankly, I have a had time imagining that this won't eventually happen. And sooner rather than later.

So choose a different ISP not all countries have the USA's broken telco regulation LLU is what you need.

You can't choose to not use Facebook unless you just go completely offline

https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f...

Not to mention there's a LOT of useful stuff on the internet that's not hosting on sites with Facebook trackers.

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