DPI red herring

First off, apologies for the slightly confusing discrepancies between the dates above my previous posts and their stated publication dates. I migrated my nascent blog from another site and wanted to show exactly when I’d written them.

Right, to Capitol Hill now, where the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has for the last couple of weeks been investigating Internet companies’ approach to privacy. The Committee is focusing particularly on behavioural targeting - the practice of inferring Internet users’ interests from their browsing behaviour and using this data to serve them more relevant (and thus more profitable) online advertisments.

The House Committee sent a letter to thirty-three Internet companies on the first of this month questioning them about their privacy policies in regard to concerns raised by behavioural targeting.

‘Questions have been raised regarding the applicability of privacy protections…and whether legislation is needed to ensure that the same protections apply regardless of the particular technologies or companies involved’, read the letter.

While, of course, all the companies vigorously defended their privacy policies, Google’s approach is worthy of note. This behemoth of the Internet made a point of denying that it uses deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, and used this claim to evade answering a number of the Committee’s 11 questions.

Deep packet inspection is a technology which examines the data in individual packets travelling across the Internet. This technology can be used by ISPs to analyse traffic passing over their networks and the analysis used to serve targeted ads to their users.

Google don’t use DPI, so that’s any concerns about user privacy out the window then, eh? Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

For every search made through Google, the company retains the URL, IP address, time and date, operating system and browser used. It also delivers advertisements dependent on the search term entered.

My problem with this is twofold. First, I don’t really want Google to know exactly where I’ve been on the Internet and what search terms I’ve entered. Secondly, I don’t want them to know who I am which, given that they have my IP address, they effectively do.

So whether or not Google uses DPI or not, they still hold an unnecessarily large amount of personal information on me which they keep for 18 months. I don’t like that.

So really, DPI is a red herring. It’s not how you get data, it’s what data you gather and whether you store it or not.

I’ll still use Google though, but not under the misapprehension that they can be trusted to “do no evil”.