I have been troubled by the allegation that the use of deep packet inspection for network management purposes by Internet Service Providers is an invasion of privacy. The issue arises in the dispute over traffic shaping of customers of one of Bell’s wholesale shared internet access products.
One commentator says that CAIP “rightly” notes that a privacy violation arises since there is no contractual relationship between Bell and the customers of the independent ISPs. CAIP’s application said:
By examining the packet data and packet header information of GAS customer traffic, Bell can identify, inter alia, the type of data being transferred, the ISP upon whose network the data is being transferred, an end-user’s intention to acquire certain types of Internet content and the IP address and, hence, the identity of the end-user customer who is sending/receiving the data. The collection and use of such information by Bell, which in this case would have clearly been done without the prior consent of the end-user customers so affected, violates the privacy of such individuals.
It seems to me that the privacy complaint is predicated on carriers actually collecting and using individual information. But all of the statements seem to indicate that carriers don’t actually use any personal information. The DPI technology looks at packets and treat all packets associated with certain applications equally. The network management is non-discriminatory on an individual level.
Isn’t this precisely why traffic shaping has impacted both legitimate and inappropriate file transfers without differentiation?
Is this any different from compression technologies that were historically used in long distance telephone networks? Such technologies looked at the nature of the traffic and applied appropriate compression algorithms based on whether the call was fax, voice, dial-up data, broadcast audio, etc.
Think of enforcement of high occupancy vehicle lanes during peak traffic periods. The police can quickly look in the windows to see if there are 2 or more passengers in the car without pulling over the car, determining where the people are from, where they are going, who is in the car, the purpose of the trip, etc.
We can have an intellectual discussion about the rights of service providers to manage their networks and the methods that may or may not be appropriate. But, the invasion of privacy claim set out by CAIP makes little sense and serves to create noise that interferes with being able to hear a more fundamental, focussed discussion on internet access policy.
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privacy, CAIP, Bell, traffic shaping, net neutrality, Canada