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Working at an ISP I've never understood all these fees/random charges, and this "fear my ISP is watching what I'm doing" Then I realise it's a US thing. In NZ w

Working at an ISP I've never understood all these fees/random charges, and this "fear my ISP is watching what I'm doing" Then I realise it's a US thing. In NZ we don't log/care what DNS sites you hit. You're better off to use our DNS because it's faster/closer to you than 1.1.1.1/8.8.8.8. We don't charge any fees, short of the $90 a month for unlimited Gigabit Ethernet speeds fibre. I feel so bad for you all. As a tech behemoth you bring amazing technology to the lives of everyone on the planet (well, within reason). But it seems your personal lives have to suffer as a result, it's so screwed up. I hope all and any stupid additional "fees" are shot down. The "Service costs you $X a month" should be all you see, it's up the ISP to account for all their outgoings before setting that price. Edit: To be clear, the ISP I work for. I don't think any of the others do either, but I obviously can't vouch for what they do/don't do. I know the Mobile Carriers here aggregate and sell locations data from the cell towers.

RajT88 3y ago
Profit is the almighty motivator in the US. For reasons I cannot fathom, most outages in US ISP's are due to their DNS servers going down. The reason ISP's log all your traffic is so they can sell that data to data brokers. The sale of a data set is not a one-time thing. You can sell it over and over again. Different brokers or end customers or even government agencies (yes the government is buying that data, reported here even) or you can sell time slices of that data or demographic slices of that data. I could not tell you how profitable that data sales is. It is a closely guarded secret. This could mean it is very high or very low, either sparking much outrage. But for sure, ISP's in the US are spying on their users for profit. Why the US and not (say) NZ? Lots of money, and lots of people. I would trust an ISP in Vanuatu not to spy on me.
zer8k 3y ago
> and this "fear my ISP is watching what I'm doing" Then I realise it's a US thing I'm not sure about it being a US thing. But I don't personally have a privacy fear with my ISP because I can't really do anything about it. At some point a clear request has to hit the edge of my ISP and at that point, no matter what I do, they will know what I'm doing. It's better to mitigate the deep packet inspection part of it rather than worry about DNS requests leaking (that's what coffee shops are for). The real problem I have with it is I pay $280/mo. for a "gigabit" line from Cox. It has a data cap. On top of having a data cap if I don't use my own DNS Cox will inject ads and other data into my requests. There are several blog posts on this happening and I am not on my computer with screenshots. It suffices to say that they, and other ISPs in the US (at least), regularly poison requests with advertisements, warnings, alerts, and other non-sense. During COVID, despite paying for a top tier plan, my connection was throttled to 10 Mbps 5/7 days a week because so many people were watching Netflix. It doesn't even matter if you pay more they'll QoS your ass into the ground at a whim. Billions of dollars and they can't even spend the time to install better hardware. The combination of last-mile control and a resulting veritable monopoly on internet in most localities means ISPs can more or less do what they want. Sucks. I try not to blame the employees but they, too, are complicit in this nonsense. ISPs are a legitimate cancer.
abigail95 3y ago
You aren't high enough on the ladder at your ISP. NZSIS has direct access to your network and 100% has a copy of that DNS traffic, including any and all metadata for every single person. Domestic SIGINT in all five eyes countries is drag net, it's all collected, facilitated by ISPs.
- muppetman 3y ago
  Are you suggesting the CEO configures the core upstream routers / BNGs without telling me? This is certainly a shock. Regardless - I was talking about us as an ISP collecting/selling that data - not the data we must provide to government agencies to fulfil our legal obligations.

RajT88 3y ago

Profit is the almighty motivator in the US. For reasons I cannot fathom, most outages in US ISP's are due to their DNS servers going down. The reason ISP's log all your traffic is so they can sell that data to data brokers. The sale of a data set is not a one-time thing. You can sell it over and over again. Different brokers or end customers or even government agencies (yes the government is buying that data, reported here even) or you can sell time slices of that data or demographic slices of that data. I could not tell you how profitable that data sales is. It is a closely guarded secret. This could mean it is very high or very low, either sparking much outrage. But for sure, ISP's in the US are spying on their users for profit. Why the US and not (say) NZ? Lots of money, and lots of people. I would trust an ISP in Vanuatu not to spy on me.

zer8k 3y ago

> and this "fear my ISP is watching what I'm doing" Then I realise it's a US thing I'm not sure about it being a US thing. But I don't personally have a privacy fear with my ISP because I can't really do anything about it. At some point a clear request has to hit the edge of my ISP and at that point, no matter what I do, they will know what I'm doing. It's better to mitigate the deep packet inspection part of it rather than worry about DNS requests leaking (that's what coffee shops are for). The real problem I have with it is I pay $280/mo. for a "gigabit" line from Cox. It has a data cap. On top of having a data cap if I don't use my own DNS Cox will inject ads and other data into my requests. There are several blog posts on this happening and I am not on my computer with screenshots. It suffices to say that they, and other ISPs in the US (at least), regularly poison requests with advertisements, warnings, alerts, and other non-sense. During COVID, despite paying for a top tier plan, my connection was throttled to 10 Mbps 5/7 days a week because so many people were watching Netflix. It doesn't even matter if you pay more they'll QoS your ass into the ground at a whim. Billions of dollars and they can't even spend the time to install better hardware. The combination of last-mile control and a resulting veritable monopoly on internet in most localities means ISPs can more or less do what they want. Sucks. I try not to blame the employees but they, too, are complicit in this nonsense. ISPs are a legitimate cancer.

abigail95 3y ago

You aren't high enough on the ladder at your ISP. NZSIS has direct access to your network and 100% has a copy of that DNS traffic, including any and all metadata for every single person. Domestic SIGINT in all five eyes countries is drag net, it's all collected, facilitated by ISPs.

muppetman 3y ago
Are you suggesting the CEO configures the core upstream routers / BNGs without telling me? This is certainly a shock. Regardless - I was talking about us as an ISP collecting/selling that data - not the data we must provide to government agencies to fulfil our legal obligations.