In November 2008, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunication Commission (CRTC) initiated a public proceeding to review the Internet traffic management practices of Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
The CRTC called for written submissions in February 2009. The OPC welcomed the opportunity to contribute to the public discussion with respect to the protection of personal information on the [...]
Final Reply Submission from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Office of the Privacy Commissioner Of Canada
Privacy is about use cases, not about technology
The rise of the consumer Internet has given unprecedented ease of access to information which once may have been considered private and personal, including information from newsgroup postings, personal blogs, social networking sites, and, in some cases, from unintentional information leakage or even intentional information theft.
DPI can be misused – so can a hammer
Coming a bit late to the party as I am, I think the other essays on DPI capture most of the issues that I would want to talk about. So I won’t, especially since I agree with most of the essayists on the issues surrounding network neutrality, spying and privacy.
However, there’s one critical aspect missing [...]
Deep Packet Inspection and the Human Element
The Internet is often portrayed as an impregnable fortress of free expression and privacy: a world in which the technology itself is designed to resist any intervention by third-parties. In fact the Internet’s infrastructure and functioning depend crucially on the behavior of intermediaries, such as Internet service providers (ISPs). Challenging the existing norm – that [...]
Just Deliver the Packets
The real threat of censorship comes not from government guarantees of content neutrality, but from carriers discriminating on the basis of content, source, and destination—probably in favor of the powerful and against the weak.
DPI as an Integrated Technology of Control – Potential and Reality
DPI teaches us again that while engineers invent powerful technologies, it is society and its norms, rules, and institutions that define if and how these technologies should and will be used.
Deep Packet Inspection: Its Nature and Implications
The proliferation of uncontrolled, non-consensual access is currently threatening to undermine the open, public Internet as it has been known for its first 15 years of operation.
Objecting to Phorm
Imagine the postal service steaming open your letters so that they could scan the content, work out your interests, and then deliver a better class of junk mail. Most people would be horrified, yet some of the UK’s largest ISPs are planning to do something even more intrusive.
Transport and Tracking
The providers of Internet access should be treated like the basic, general purpose actors they are. … Acting otherwise confounds consumer expectations and runs counter to more than a hundred years of basic communications understandings.
DPI: The future is out there
ISPs here claim they are engaged in DPI for narrow reasons of bandwidth control, and not for political reasons. Can we trust them? Recent research from the IWM should raise concerns.
Phorm: A New Paradigm in Internet Advertising
Phorm believes the first tenet of data security is data minimization – data not stored is data not at risk of being misused or misappropriated.
Deep Packet Inspection and the Transparency of Citizens
DPI adds to the trend that broader groups of unsuspected citizens are under surveillance: rather than investigating relatively few individuals on the basis of reasonable indications that they have committed a crime, more people are being watched for slight indications of being involved in (potential) crimes.
The Privacy Implications of Deep Packet Inspection
If DPI becomes a fact of life, informed consumers may curtail their online communications rather than risk its release to others. This would stunt our creativity and intellectual privacy, so critical to the development of our ideas and free speech.
Net Neutrality and Deep Packet Inspection: Discourse and Practice
Besides purely technical reasons, ISPs can have other justifications for adopting DPI appliances…. Beyond traffic shaping, sniffing packets for content control is a normative activity, motivated by rules, laws and morality instead of purely technological imperatives.
The Greatest Threat to Privacy
You can hide from Google but it is very hard to hide from your ISP. Even though Google collects a lot of information about what its users do when they use its services, it cannot track what it cannot see.
Deep Packet Inspection – Bring It On
I support and encourage the widespread adoption of deep packet inspection technology. My hope is that once privacy invasion becomes the norm, consumers will start to demand encryption.
Deep Packet Inspection is Essential for Net Neutrality
It is essential to have the flexibility to develop, test, and deploy new ways to protect the Internet. These mechanisms will, by and large, be based upon deep packet inspection, simply because that’s where the necessary information is—block DPI and we won’t be able to keep the Internet running.
Badware and DPI
That the system is designed to keep the data anonymous is not sufficient. A user should know about the data being collected and shared and decide for herself whether the companies in question can be trusted to keep their commitment to anonymity.
Review of the Internet traffic management practices of Internet service providers
Office of the Privacy Commissioner Of Canada
The CRTC and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada have complementary statutory roles regarding privacy protection. The CRTC’s mandate under the Telecommunications Act specifically includes contributing to the protection of the privacy of persons as a matter of Canadian telecommunications policy. The OPC’s submission is made pursuant to our legislative mandate to protect the privacy rights of individuals, foster public understanding of privacy, and promote the privacy protections available to Canadians. The OPC’s submission is focused on the privacy implications about the potential uses of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).