EON

Government Investigating Claims Of Unauthorized Monitoring

Ottawa- The commissioner of Privacy for the government of Canada is investigating some claims that Internet service providers in Canada are monitoring the online behavior and activities of some customers without their permission.

The issues centers around a practice called Deep Packet Inspection, which is a method that some Internet service providers use slow down sectors of Internet Traffic that are taking more than their share of bandwidth in the option of the supervising ISP operators.

The University of Ottawa’s Canadian Public Interest Clinic and Internet Policy organization is saying that such a practice is against the privacy legislation currently on the books in Canada.

According to the University Internet and Privacy group, such a practice is used to reassemble email messages and can be used to look at what sites a group or individual visits on the Internet, and such information then is used to build a profile. This profile can then be sold to groups for advertising and marketing targeted campaigns.

A spokesman for Rogers Communications, one of the larger ISP’s doing business in Canada claims this is simply not being done at all.

“We are not aware of the content, we don’t know if its voice or video, we simply separate the content to find out the bandwidth, we don’t care about the content,” said Ken Englehart.

Ken Englehart is chief of regulatory affairs for Rogers Communications.