What ISPs Can See
Roseanne Gennett
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The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.
The FTC just released a report based on data received from major players in the mobile Internet market and A Look at What ISPs Know About You: Examining the Privacy Practices of Six Major Internet Service Providers is an eye opener. According to the FTC, several Internet service providers collect and share far more personal data than their customers expect while failing to give customers meaningful choice about how that data can be used.
Although many ISPs in the study purport to offer consumers choices, those choices are often illusory. Several ISPs in the study claim to offer choices about data collection, but how clearly do they explain that to their subscribers? And to what extent do those ISPs nudge people toward sharing more data?
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We believe that the Swire paper, although technically accurate in most of its particulars, could leave readers with some mistaken impressions about what broadband ISPs can see. We offer this report as a complement to the Swire paper, and an alternative, technically expert assessment of the present and potential future monitoring capabilities available to ISPs.
4. VPNs are poorly adopted, and can provide incomplete protection. VPNs have been commercially available for years, but they are used sparsely in the United States, for a range of reasons we describe below.
We agree that public policy needs to be built on an accurate technical foundation, and we believe that thoughtful policies, especially those related to Internet technologies, should be reasonably robust to foreseeable technical developments.
We intend for this report to assist policymakers, advocates, and the general public as they consider the technical capabilities of broadband ISPs, and the broader technical context within which this policy debate is happening. This paper does not, however, take a position on any question of public policy.
Today, a significant portion of Internet activity remains unencrypted. When a web site uses the unencrypted Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), an ISP can see the full Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and the content for any web page requested by the user. Although many popular, high-traffic web sites have adopted encryption by default, a "long tail" of web sites have not.
The fraction of total traffic that is encrypted on the Internet is a poor guide to the privacy interests of a typical user. The Swire paper argues that "the norm has become that deep links and content are encrypted on the Internet," basing its claim on the true observation that "an estimated 70 percent of traffic will be encrypted by the end of 2016." However, this number includes traffic from sites like Netflix, which itself accounts for about 35% of all downstream Internet traffic in North America.
The increased use of encryption on the Web is a substantial privacy improvement for users. When a web site does use HTTPS, an ISP cannot see URLs and content in unencrypted form. However, ISPs can still almost always see the domain names that their subscribers visit.
Even if connections to bankofamerica.com are encrypted, DNS queries about bankofamerica.com are not. In fact, DNS queries are almost never encrypted. ISPs could simply monitor what queries its users are making over the network.
Encryption stops ISPs from simply reading content and URL information directly off the wire. However, it is important to understand that encryption still leaves open a wide variety of other, less direct methods for ISPs to monitor their users if they chose.
Researchers have published numerous studies on the topic of web site fingerprinting. In one early study using a relatively basic technique, researchers found that approximately 60% of the web pages they studied were uniquely identifiable based on such unconcealed features. Later studies have introduced more advanced techniques, as well as possible countermeasures. But even with various defenses in place, researchers were still able to distinguish precisely which out of a hundred different sites a user was visiting, more than 50% of the time.
The Swire paper presents VPNs (and other encrypted proxy services) as an up-and-coming source of protection for subscribers. However, there are reasons to question whether VPNs will in fact have a significant impact on personal Internet use in the United States.
Relative to other countries, the rate of VPN use in the U.S. is among the lowest in the world. VPN use is much more pronounced in other countries like Indonesia, Thailand and China, where Internet users turn to VPNs a way to circumvent online censorship, and to actively gain access to restricted content.
VPNs are not a privacy silver bullet. The use of VPNs and encrypted proxies merely shifts user trust from one intermediary (the ISP) to another (the VPN or proxy operator). In order to more thoroughly protect their traffic from their ISP, a subscriber must entrust that same traffic to another network operator.
We hope that this report will contribute to a more complete understanding of the technical capabilities of broadband ISPs, and the broader technical context within which the broadband privacy debate is happening.
Readers who identify any factual errors in this report, or who have other feedback regarding its contents, are warmly invited to contact us at he...@teamupturn.com. This report was supported by the Media Democracy Fund.
This project maps the ways that data at scale may pose risks to philanthropic priorities and beneficiaries, identifies key questions that funders and grantees should consider before undertaking data-intensive work, and offers recommendations for funders to address emergent data ethics issues.
The State Plane Coordinate System is comprised of 120+ geographic zones across the US. The system, developed in the 1930s by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, is a commonly used mapping standard for government agencies and those who work with them.
My initial work in GIS was to allocate mapping resources to provide the base layers for large regional geographic information systems being developed primarily by the various utility companies. In the pre-internet days this work was accomplished by telephone inquiry starting at a state geological office or somewhere to see if there was any existing mapping available. GIS has evolved since then, but, just wanted to throw that in to let people know that GIS was existing before the world wide web.
A: I created the site in 1999, and most of its creation is covered in the metadata I created for the page. Actually, I was one of the first people to quit using the page, so changes would have to be made by someone else.
A: The world has become so dynamic. Everything is changing. People and politics, the environment, business and trade, and world economies. GIS is the only science that is capable of accumulating all the data, visualizing the data, comprehending the data, and finally using the data to forecast future models that will benefit us all. Population management, food management, resource management will be extremely vital in the near future. There will be plenty of opportunities to resolve what most of us believe are foreseeable problems, especially having clean water and adequate food for everyone.
What is ISPS, and what does ISPS stand for in shipping? Whether you are an existing importer, exporter, trader, or a novice in the shipping and trading business, you need to know the answers to this before you enter into the business.
If you have been checking your freight quotes or gone into the anatomy of a freight invoice, you would have noticed a charge called ISPS Charge or ISPS Surcharge or simply ISPS. The ISPS abbreviation stands for International Ship and Port Security, should not be considered just another acronym in the world of shipping otherwise filled with acronyms.
If you ask yourself the meaning of ISPS, then nicely, ted, after the 9/11 attacks. The IMO (International Maritime Organization) realized that what happened in the air could also occur on the sea or via the sea. Thus, the IMO decided to develop, recommend, and implement security measures applicable to ships and port facilities worldwide.
These measures are termed the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code (ISPS). They are implemented through the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), 1974 chapter XI-2, to enhance maritime security.
The primary objective of the ISPS Code is to provide a standardized, consistent global framework across the maritime world. This will enable the countries that have subscribed to the code to evaluate, detect and assess the security risks to the ships calling at their ports and take appropriate measures to determine the security levels they must follow and the related security/preventive measures to be taken.
In terms of the ISPS code, shipping lines, ports, and terminals are required to place appropriate security officers/personnel onboard each vessel, in each port facility, and each shipping company to prepare and put into effect the security plans that will be implemented.
The local port authority implements the security levels under consultation with the government authorities. The security level adopted by the port facility must be coordinated with the ship for synergy.
The ISPS code must be implemented in its fullest form to ensure the safety and protection of all concerned. For a shipping line and port, it means additional expenses for the employment of qualified and trained personnel capable of implementing the security measures required by the code.
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