p2pnet view Freedom | P2P:- Britain’s TalkTalk ISP talks itself up as a Noble Defender of the Great Online Unwashed. But p2pnet wonders if it it and its boss, Charles Dunstone (right), are just that.

Talk.

Now it’s been caught flat-footed — or should that be red-handed? — monitoring users without their knowledge or consent.

Company communications director Mark Schmid admits since July, it’s been “generating a list of websites which are being connected to across our network, and then scanning those sites for potential malware”, says the Telegraph.

Doesn’t that mean it’s been poking around behind doors which should have been firmly closed to it?

“We are not connecting people’s personal IP address … to each website visited,” says Schmid.

He doesn’t explain how that justifies TalkTalk’s secret data collections.

“TalkTalk should have informed its customers that it was beginning a website monitoring trial and offered them the chance to actively ‘opt-in’ beforehand”, says Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock in the story.

“When companies use any kind of interception technology they needs to make it explicitly known to the people being monitored,” he states.

Dunstone “has been vocal about protecting its customers’ online privacy with regard to the anti-piracy clauses in the Digital Economy Act”, says the story, adding:

“He has refused to send his customers, who were suspected file-sharers, warning letters about their supposed activities or disconnect them. At the start of this month TalkTalk and BT started a High Court battle to get the Act repealed.”

Looks good, said p2pnet in April, going on >>>

Except for two items the mainstream (and other) media always fail to mention.

1) Parental ‘controls’ >>>

“Parents choosing the [TallTalk] U or 14 options would block every PC in the household from accessing file-sharing sites such as the Pirate Bay, as well as pornography and gambling, without the need for extra software on the computer itself, within our network …”

… the Financial Times had TalkTalk boss Charlie Dunstone (right) promising last year; and,

2) TalkTalk BitTorrent blacklist >>>

This [the parent control system] is something that we are going to do anyway, as a service to our customers.

But through doing it we can also help the content industry by blacklisting sites that have BitTorrent … files on them [our emphasis].

Blacklist BT sites?

That’s entertainment cartel-style censorship of the type the Oz government hopes to run via an online ‘filter’ operation, also based on a blacklist.

‘Bad publicity, time wasting, copyright violation’

TalkTalk also has a ’service’ it openly calls Web Content Filtering.

Here’s what it says >>>

[...] allowing your users unrestricted Internet access can result in serious financial, legal and social consequences. Bad publicity, time wasting, copyright violation as a result of music downloads, the viewing of explicit content and co-worker complaints are all problems that can occur unless controls are put in place.

Allowing customers free, untramelled use of the service, for which they pay good money?

Oh! The Horror!

TalkTalk goes on >>>

Despite the obvious pitfalls many organisations are fearful of the complexity and cost of solutions that filter Internet content.

But not TalkTalk. Because it says it has “the answer”, the  TalkTalk ‘Internet web filtering service’ which is “one of the most effective, affordable and easy-to-use solution available today, complete with >>>

Dynamic Control List – Internet access is managed through the dynamic Control List, a database of many millions of Web sites organized into different categories for flexible policy enforcement options including security (spyware, malware, P2P), confidentiality (chat, IM), and bandwidth management (Internet radio/TV, streaming media).

Dynamic control is, of course, a euphemism for censorship.

Meanwhile, “Reporting is a key part of any Web filtering solution” and, “With Talk Internet’s web filtering service, you can quickly understand how your companies internet access and monitor inappropriate Web activity”, it says, stressing >>>

Control – Deny All – Only allows access to a list of websites that have been provided by yourself. You can add and delete sites on-line to extend or reduce the list. Except All – If you need full Internet access but require restrictions on certain Websites, we can provide a restriction service based on a set of keywords that you provide. For example to reduce access to sites containing the word ’sex’ you would add this to your list. You can add or delete words on-line to extend or reduce your list.

Features:
Simple web based management to set your access policies.
Industry standard control lists.
Keyword based content filtering.
Detailed reporting of internet usage.

TalkTalk?

No thanks, we said in April.

Nothing has changed..

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… and identi.ca

Telegraph – Customer outrage over TalkTalk monitoring web use, July 29, 2010
p2pnet – TalkTalk BitTorrent censoring ’solution’, April 12, 2010

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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