AT&T has been running commercials where they brag that their monitoring of network traffic allows them to combat id theft, fraud, etc.
How is that not an invasion of privacy?
And if not why did everyone get in such a snit about the NSA doing pretty much the same thing?
Uh, do you use Google at all? Amazon? Are you seriously not aware that your online activities are being watched constantly and used to make someone else money?
I believe this ad is referring to their commercial customers. If I’m running my network through AT&T and they notice a spike in my traffic every night at about 2am, I’d like to know because perhaps someone is siphoning data off my network at a time when they think I’m asleep. A lot of this monitoring doesn’t involve actually examining the content of the traffic but instead is looking at the volume and patterns of it.
IF that it what they are really doing. More likely they are snooping on your to try to shape your traffic and getting kickbacks from companies seeking to sue you if you’re downloading illegal torrents and such.
It’s all too common to use a “legitimate” excuse to fuel the illegitimate desire.
OK, that makes perfect sense. They’re going to run commercials boasting that they’re monitoring network traffic to combat fraud to hide that they’s snooping on people. If they’re snooping surreptitiously, why advertise at all? But feel free to feed your paranoid fantasies.
Do you suppose that AT&T has no right to know if its services and infrastructure are being used to facilitate federal crimes?
I don’t know - does the US Post Office have a right to, without cause, open and read your mail? They may for all I know, but we don’t hear much about it being done. And they certainly don’t advertise it, like it was a reason to use them.
One of the differences here between AT&T and Google or Amazon is that neither of the latter is an ISP, nor do they brag about their snooping.
I don’t really care much about AT&T’s snooping; I’m just surprised people aren’t more shook up about it - they sure got riled up about the NSA. Perhaps ‘Big Business’ is one rung down the paranoia ladder from ‘Big Government’.
This isn’t comparable to “reading your mail”. It’s more comparable to noticing that you’ve been sending a lot of mail to a person known to be involved in the drug trade.
Commercial mailings (that is, non-first class), yes. Otherwise, not without a warrant (which requires a showing of probable cause).
FedEx or other private carriers (which are a closer analogy) can open anything they like, though.
Unless you’ve encrypted your traffic and AT&T is breaking that encryption, it’s hardly snooping. To use a postal service metaphor, unencrypted traffic is like sending a postcard- the sender, address and message are all there to read. Encrypted traffic is putting it in an envelope- anyone can see where it came from, and where it’s going, but they can’t read the contents.
I suspect though, that AT&T’s commercials are more centered around identifying certain patterns of traffic that indicate botnets and other sketchy computing behaviors, and being able to shut those down. They don’t have any financial interest in looking at your packets to find out that you have a diaper fetish or whatever, but they do in being able to provide a more secure and safe network to their commercial and home customers.
Is this the commercial that the OP was referring to? It’s clearly talking about AT&T’s commercial customers. The description from the iSpot.tv site is, “A retail manager can only focus on the possibility of a breach of his company’s data. The moment the customer swipes her card, the information is leaked. He watches it show up on every device in the store, and then, the information is literally pouring down in the streets of the city. AT&T monitors network traffic world wide and sees things others can’t. That prevents risks and leaves you free to focus on what’s really important.”