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Something being in their best interest doesn't mean that it's ethical. This is still a gross invasion of privacy. I agree that it is in their best interest, b

Something being in their best interest doesn't mean that it's ethical. This is still a gross invasion of privacy. I agree that it is in their best interest, but would argue that their TV and internet services should be split into separate companies so that the company interest and the user interest align.

Mindwipe 5y ago
Gross invasion of privacy? They aren't doing blockings of individuals here, they are looking at aggregate traffic to certain sites, and literally every ISP on the world does that because they need to optimise their peering arrangements for high traffic, high QoS sites (such as installing OpenCache for Netflix).
- paranoidrobot 5y ago
  The difference between aggregating traffic for the purposes of internal network management, and sending traffic data to a third party is not hard to see. It's also a vastly different type of aggregation.
  - Mindwipe 5y ago
    > The difference between aggregating traffic for the purposes of internal network management, and sending traffic data to a third party is not hard to see. Is it? If they send it to a third party technical subcontractor for internal network management is that bad? If they publish a chart publicly of the top ten websites our users visit is that bad? (That's very common). If they pass the data to geofiltering vendors to use for threat intelligence to reduce DDOS attacks is that bad? Fraud? What exactly is the obvious line here that you think exists, other than "I don't like copyright."
    - jollybean 5y ago
      They are sending it to a third party so that party can use indirect behavioural information to enforce commercial contracts. Imagine McDonald's selling data to your insurance provider so they can help determine your rates etc.. It's definitely out of bounds and worth putting up a fuss over.
      - crtasm 5y ago
        But they're not sending any customer data in this case. It's a list of IPs of servers that are seeing traffic spikes on their network, not IPs of customers connecting to them.
- White_Wolf 5y ago
  By your logic you'd by fine with your phone provider handing over all call logs and recordings to the govt too along with full browsing history, location data... you know... since they already have the data.
  - Mindwipe 5y ago
    > By your logic you'd by fine with your phone provider handing over all call logs and recordings to the govt too along with full browsing history, location data... you know... since they already have the data. In the UK all phone providers are required to keep all call logs, location data etc for six months to hand over to the government in a variety of circumstances, so that ship sailed a long time ago. However, that is the most broken comparison I could possibly imagine, so no.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    We're not talking about "call logs". Sky is collecting information about where their heavy traffic is going, which as Mindwipe says, is just sensible network management. Then they share some of that data with 3rd-parties. That's not information about their customers; it's the IP addresses of IPTV servers they've been streaming from. They could be sharing information about which customers have been streaming from those addresses; but that's not what the article is claiming. I subscribe to Sky satellite for TV. I get my broadband elsewhere. The Sky box is not susceptible to inspection, and since it integrates online "catchup" services, it might well be using my broadband connection to send home information about my viewing habits. The Sky box also creates a shadow wifi network, by default. The shadow network uses at least two wifi channels. On the face of it, this is to allow multiple Sky boxes on the same household account to communicate with one-another, share recordings and so on. I'm not keen to have wifi networks I don't control piggy-backing on my ISP connection; and since I only have a single Sky box, I disable toe wifi. I trust Sky as far as I could throw them, so I have plans to find out what my Sky box is talking to, and firewall it.
    - 88 5y ago
      If you are using one of the newer Sky Q boxes, my anecdotal understanding is that they phone home a fairly terrifying amount of telemetry data. Would certainly be a fascinating project to MITM and figure out exactly what is being sent.
enkid 5y ago
I think the parent comment was highlighting the conflict of interest and moral hazard here, not excusing the behavior.
tablespoon 5y ago
> Something being in their best interest doesn't mean that it's ethical. They don't care about ethics if it gets in the way of making money. That's the beast that is capitalism.

Mindwipe 5y ago

Gross invasion of privacy? They aren't doing blockings of individuals here, they are looking at aggregate traffic to certain sites, and literally every ISP on the world does that because they need to optimise their peering arrangements for high traffic, high QoS sites (such as installing OpenCache for Netflix).

paranoidrobot 5y ago
The difference between aggregating traffic for the purposes of internal network management, and sending traffic data to a third party is not hard to see. It's also a vastly different type of aggregation.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  > The difference between aggregating traffic for the purposes of internal network management, and sending traffic data to a third party is not hard to see. Is it? If they send it to a third party technical subcontractor for internal network management is that bad? If they publish a chart publicly of the top ten websites our users visit is that bad? (That's very common). If they pass the data to geofiltering vendors to use for threat intelligence to reduce DDOS attacks is that bad? Fraud? What exactly is the obvious line here that you think exists, other than "I don't like copyright."
  - jollybean 5y ago
    They are sending it to a third party so that party can use indirect behavioural information to enforce commercial contracts. Imagine McDonald's selling data to your insurance provider so they can help determine your rates etc.. It's definitely out of bounds and worth putting up a fuss over.
    - crtasm 5y ago
      But they're not sending any customer data in this case. It's a list of IPs of servers that are seeing traffic spikes on their network, not IPs of customers connecting to them.
White_Wolf 5y ago
By your logic you'd by fine with your phone provider handing over all call logs and recordings to the govt too along with full browsing history, location data... you know... since they already have the data.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  > By your logic you'd by fine with your phone provider handing over all call logs and recordings to the govt too along with full browsing history, location data... you know... since they already have the data. In the UK all phone providers are required to keep all call logs, location data etc for six months to hand over to the government in a variety of circumstances, so that ship sailed a long time ago. However, that is the most broken comparison I could possibly imagine, so no.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  We're not talking about "call logs". Sky is collecting information about where their heavy traffic is going, which as Mindwipe says, is just sensible network management. Then they share some of that data with 3rd-parties. That's not information about their customers; it's the IP addresses of IPTV servers they've been streaming from. They could be sharing information about which customers have been streaming from those addresses; but that's not what the article is claiming. I subscribe to Sky satellite for TV. I get my broadband elsewhere. The Sky box is not susceptible to inspection, and since it integrates online "catchup" services, it might well be using my broadband connection to send home information about my viewing habits. The Sky box also creates a shadow wifi network, by default. The shadow network uses at least two wifi channels. On the face of it, this is to allow multiple Sky boxes on the same household account to communicate with one-another, share recordings and so on. I'm not keen to have wifi networks I don't control piggy-backing on my ISP connection; and since I only have a single Sky box, I disable toe wifi. I trust Sky as far as I could throw them, so I have plans to find out what my Sky box is talking to, and firewall it.
  - 88 5y ago
    If you are using one of the newer Sky Q boxes, my anecdotal understanding is that they phone home a fairly terrifying amount of telemetry data. Would certainly be a fascinating project to MITM and figure out exactly what is being sent.

enkid 5y ago

I think the parent comment was highlighting the conflict of interest and moral hazard here, not excusing the behavior.

tablespoon 5y ago

> Something being in their best interest doesn't mean that it's ethical. They don't care about ethics if it gets in the way of making money. That's the beast that is capitalism.