Bell Canada's DPI raises privacy concerns

A Canadian public interest watchdog is raising a fuss over deep packet inspections by ISPs, calling the procedure an invasion of privacy and complaining to Canada's privacy commissioner.
 
The brouhaha has its roots in Bell Canada's traffic shaping using DPI and has expanded to include other providers as well, specifically Rogers and Shaw. It'll only get more attention as DPI--which can drill all the way through headers into content making its way through the 'Net--gets more sophisticated and put into wider use.
 
Bell said it doesn't actually look into content, but only at packet headers and traffic flow, shunting P2P content, but that's enough to have piqued the interest of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.
 
CIPPIC, a group based at the University of Ottawa says "data packets gathered by ISPs through the use of DPI are (or can be) associated with identifiable subscribers via the IP addresses attached to those data packets," a no-no in Canada where privacy is taken seriously.
 
For more:
- See the Ars technica story 

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