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Comcast Says It Records Web Browsing of Its 1 Million Internet Subscribers

WASHINGTON (AP) - Comcast Corp., the nation's third-largest cable company, has started recording the Web browsing activities of each of its 1 million high-speed Internet subscribers without notifying them of the change.

Comcast acknowledged Tuesday that it is recording which Web pages each customer visits as part of a technology overhaul that it hopes will save money and speed up its network, but which was not intended to infringe on privacy.

Outside experts - including the vendor whose powerful software Comcast is using - said Comcast is recording more information about the online activities of customers than is necessary for the technology enhancements.

"It's not needed," said Steve Russell, a vice president for Inktomi Corp. Russell said Inktomi's software also records other information from Comcast subscribers, which can include passwords for Web sites and credit-card numbers under limited circumstances.

Russell discounted privacy concerns, saying engineers are using some of the information to improve Comcast performance and that many other Internet devices record data racing across computer networks.

But two of the nation's largest Internet providers, America Online and Earthlink, said they purposely do not collect details about the Web browsing of their combined 35 million subscribers.

"We definitely would have no interest in doing that at all," Earthlink's chief privacy officer, Les Seagraves, said. "We don't want to have customer records about where they've visited."

AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said: "We do not track the personal Web activity of our members for privacy reasons."

Comcast Executive Vice President Dave Watson said the company records no more information about its customers than is common in the industry and no more than needed to optimize its network. He said that while the company records details about customer Web browsing, it does not use the information to build profiles of online consumer behavior.

"Comcast absolutely does not share personal information about our customers, and we have the utmost respect for our customers' privacy," Watson said.

A Comcast spokesman, Tim Fitzpatrick, said Web browsing was already being recorded for its subscribers in Detroit and in parts of Delaware and Virginia, and would be extended across the nation by the end of this week.

"I'm furious," said George Imburgia, an Internet security expert in Dover, Del., and a Comcast customer. "They're monitoring and logging everybody's activities." Imburgia compared the monitoring to the surveillance software the FBI uses. "It's an evil, Carnivore-type thing," he said.

Fitzpatrick acknowledged that customers weren't individually notified of any change in what's recorded behind the scenes. But he said Comcast's subscriber and privacy agreements, available on its Web site, tell customers that the company collects information "about where you go on the service or on the Web."

Fitzpatrick said Comcast, using the Inktomi software, is recording the numeric Internet address uniquely assigned to each subscriber, along with the Internet address of each requested Web page. Comcast stores the information for days before it's deleted, but would not say for exactly how long.

Watson, the Comcast executive, said the company does not match a subscriber's identity to the numeric Internet address they use online.

Comcast's recording is part of an overhaul requiring new and existing customers to use behind-the-scenes technology known as a "proxy," which funnels a person's Web surfing through powerful, centralized Internet computers controlled by Comcast. Customers previously could volunteer to use these proxy computers, but they are automatically activated under the new system for all subscribers.

To speed performance, these proxy computers retain copies of the most-popular Web sites that customers visit. Comcast said it records which are the most popular Web sites to determine which ones it should copy to its centralized computers, though leading industry experts said there was no need to match Web surfing back to the specific Internet addresses of subscribers.

Experts said Comcast's own records of online activity would be available to police and the FBI with a court order and to lawyers in civil lawsuits, though Comcast said it did not begin tracking because of any government request.

"Once you're sitting on it, you're really inviting all kinds of requests," said David Sobel of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil-liberties group. "If they can't identify a need to be collecting it, they should take the necessary steps to eliminate it."

-- Anonymous, February 13, 2002