Is Your ISP Selling Your Clickstream Data?
ISPs sell your (just slightly) anonymized clickstream data. This explains how Compete Snapshot gets its data -- though, early reviews suggest the data isn't very good.
This isn't aggregate data. The ISPs are literally selling the fact that
"user 1" went to this particular list of sites in this order. He
doesn't say who's buying the data (besides making it clear that he's a
customer), but you can bet some of the hedge funds are making good use
of it in determining what's hot as well.
AOL released search stream data.
In this case, it's selling
your surfing habits for pure profit -- though, the "risks" are smaller
since it's not nearly as easy for anyone to get their hands on the
data. Of course, it probably isn't particularly hard to take that data
and figure out who many of the "anonymous" users are, if someone wanted
to do so.
It would be interesting to see if users could make a case for
this violating their privacy -- though, it would be quite difficult for
any particular individual to find out if their ISP is doing this since,
once again, the data is private.
It's just one more reminder that your
privacy may not be as private as you believe -- and also a reminder
that figuring out how to surf the web over an encrypted system isn't a
bad idea if you want to keep your surfing habits private.