By Art Reisman
CTO of APconnections, makers of the plug-and-play bandwidth control and traffic shaping appliance NetEqualizer
Editors note:
This latest article published in DSL reports reminds me of the time where a bunch of friends (not me), are smoking a joint in a car when the police pull them over, and the guy holding the joint takes the fall for everybody. I don’t want to see any of these ISPs get hammered as I am sure they are good companies.
It seems like this case should be easily settled. Even if privacy laws were viloated , the damage was perhaps a few unwanted AD’s that popped up on a browser, not some form of extortion of private records. In any case, the message should be clear to any ISP, don’t implement DPI of any kind to be safe. And yet, for every NebuAd privacy lawsuit case article I come across , I must see at least two or three press releases from vendors announcing major deals with for DPI equipment ?
FUll Original article link from DSL reports
ISPs Play Dumb In NebuAD Lawsuit
Claim they were ‘passive participants’ in user data sales…
08:54AM Thursday Feb 05 2009 by Karl Bode
tags: legal · business · privacy · consumers · Embarq · CableOne · Knology
Tipped by funchords 
By “passive participants,” they mean they took (or planned to take) money from NebuAD in exchange for allowing NebuAD to place deep packet inspection hardware on their networks. That hardware collected all browsing activity for all users, including what pages were visited, and how long each user stayed there. It’s true many of the the carriers were rather passive in failing to inform customers these trials were occurring — several simply tried to slip this through fine print in their terms of service or acceptable use policies.
NetEqualizer News Blog 
Deep packet Inspection a poison pill for NebuAd ?
November 12, 2008 — netequalizerEditors Note:
NebuAd had a great idea show ads to users based on content and share the revenue with ISPs that sign up for their service. What is wrong with this Idea ? I guess customers don’t like people looking at their private data using DPI hence the lawsuit detailed in the article below. The funny thing is we are still hearing from customers that want DPI as part of their solution, this includes many Universities , ISPs and alike. I think the message is clear: Don’t use Deep Packet Inspection unless you fully disclose this practice to your customers/employees or risk getting your head nailed to a table.
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From Zdnet Nov 11, 2008
NebuAd, the controversial company that was trying to sell deep-packet inspection technology as a means of delivering more relevant ads, has already had most of the life sucked out of it. Now, a class action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco today, could put the final nail in the coffin.
Full article
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=10774
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