Your profile reveals you're a former Comcast employee. That's a disclaimer worth posting here.

But yeah, if you have service with Comcast they have your home phone, email addresses, and physical address. They can get in touch with you every way that every company that CAN'T read all of your internet traffic already gets in touch with you.

The method they've chosen is terrible for at least the following reasons: - The alert will not work on many platforms & devices. - The alert may not reach the account owner. - The alert will not work on SSL traffic. - There is no record that the customer saw the alert (contrast with phone call) - There are serious privacy issues involved in parsing user's web traffic.

It's extremely bad. The fact that ISP monopolies are not regulated in favor of consumers is slowly going to destroy the openness that has made the web so successful. Instead of giving us raw pipes these monopolies are injecting themselves as proxies where they can monitor, cap bandwidths, shape traffic, censor content, insert messages and even add ads, which Comcast already does when a DNS request is not resolved in a HTTP session.

If you look at what Comcast does on the TV side, things like adding ads to the guide so it's barely usable, you can see where this is going. But the federal regulators of the monopolies are asleep at the switch, we can't even get network neutrality passed. The monopolies know how to play the lobbying game as well as how to slowly turn up the heat so the users aren't all outraged at once. But we can expect more abuses, more ads, more monitoring, more restrictions, more unwanted 'value adds' as time goes on.

Here are some other ways.

1. They could email you. 2. They could send you a SMS. 3. They could let you view your bandwidth usage by logging into their site. 4. They could provide an application (desktop or mobile) to keep track of your bandwidth and alert you at certain points.

They should redirect to a notification page. Injecting js is unacceptable.

I can't think of a worse way to message it. You don't inject your data into my private communications. No matter what.

The right way would be to ask the customer when they sign up for service what method they would like to receive service notices through. Phone, email, SMS, lettermail, twitter, Facebook, there's a million better ways than to modify my data.

Oh boy.

Since you're a comcast employee, maybe go ask the guys running your SMTP/POP3/IMAP servers. I have faith that you guys can come up with some way to communicate with the people using them.

Email? Text?

And what happens when your 6 year old kid gets all the notifications? Or your neighbor who is using your Wi-Fi?

I suppose calling on the phone is out of the question.