ISPs Are Selling Your Clickstreams!

At Open Data, David Cancel, the CTO of Compete, Inc., reveals that ISPs happily sell clickstream data--and that it's a big business.  They don't sell your name--just your clicks--but the clicks are tied to you as a specific user (User 1, User 2, etc.).

How much are your clicks worth?  An symposium member extrapolated from David's round numbers and estimated about 40 cents a month per user (per customer)--a number with which David appears to agree.

Someone points out that this is more information than was shared by AOL in the search-term brouhaha.  It's much more! David says.  Someone else observes that the benefits/drawbacks of this are in the eye of the beholder: for the ISPs it's awesome.  Someone else points out (see comments) that the credit card companies sell far more interesting data than this and no one gives a damn.

David steps down.  Thunderous applause.

Comments

[King Troll]

Henry get with it bro. Google just got sued for $1 billion. Haha Fuck you Shmidt!

[p-air]

As I recall fm David's chat on the matter, it wasn't that all of the ISPs were selling info but mostly the cable ISPs (a la Comcast). David further added that he wasn't sure why people were all up in a tizzy over this since the credit card companies actually sell a lot more sensitive info than anything he gets fm these data deals.

[Kevin Burton]

Note that a lot of security researchers believe that when the data doesn't contain any personal information (such as query strings) that if you return the data in bulk that it provides anonymity.

Crowd protocols ....