Comcast Is Reading Your Blog 235
Paolo writes "A Washington student got a bit of a shock when he received an email from internet service provider Comcast about comments he had made on his blog. Brandon Dilbeck, a student at the University of Washington, writes a blog and used it to complain about the service he was getting from Comcast. Shortly afterwards he got an email message from Comcast apologizing for the problems and suggesting he might look at a guide it had posted on its web site. Lyza Gardner, a vice president at a Web development company in Portland used Twitter to complain about the company and was surprised to be contacted directly.
Comcast is now monitoring blogs as a way of improving its image among customers. The company was ranked at the bottom of the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index."
Is that you Comcast? (Score:-1, Informative)
Apparently, reading Slashdot and your outbound email [slashdot.org] was not good enough. Yes indeed, Cox did correct the immediate technical problem [brlug.net], but no one is swearing off creepy practices. Comcast, as usual, is going the last mile to assure everyone that Big Brother is watching but you can be sure that other ISPs have and will be using the same "technology" to spy on their users. How else will TIA happen?
Re:Is that you Comcast? (Score:2, Informative)
But does Comcast read the newspapers? (Score:5, Informative)
Go to news.google.com and look up "Comcast Vermont." You'll see articles in every Vermont daily paper about how Comcast has dropped 8 channels from its basic analog service (including MSNBC and Comcast's own cable news station). It's telling people who miss those stations from their $18-a-month plan they can get them back by going to a $58-a-month digital plan. The state may be able to act against this, since Comcast is only allowed one "rate change" a year, and this would be the second, if dropping channels and charging the same price counts as a rate change. Comcast claims it doesn't. In Comcast's eyes, it can drop any plan to a single channel, offer more expensive plans to those who want their channels back, and it hasn't changed rates at all.
Disclaimer: My brother-in-law is a Comcast executive. He's a decent guy.
Re:Is that you Comcast? (Score:4, Informative)
If they read blogs they are accessing public information. So it is at least not invasion of privacy as it is whenever email is read/filtered.
If the reading of blogs can help to improve the service that essentially means that the ISP in question has an internal problem with their customer satisfaction tracking. But reading blogs can of course provide more meat on the bone that any issue tracking system can't resolve.
More problematic is the cases where ISP:s are reading your web habits and are injecting or replacing information in the web pages you visit. Sometimes resulting in data corruption.
Re:Is that you Comcast? (Score:1, Informative)
You have to have money or great insurance to get treatment for psych issues nowadays, and I'm sure twitter is far too crazy to have such means. He's probably more like the people on the street screaming at imaginary enemies, except he just hasn't quite hit rock bottom yet.