

Aussie telco sends user data to US to build web filter - maskofsanity
http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/306441,telstra-tracks-users-to-build-web-filter.aspx

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sdiwakar
Amazing, I'm quite surprised this hasn't been picked up by larger media
outlets.

Whilst there's nothing wrong with a 3rd party service accessing a publicly
available web-site; for my ISP to _willingly_ on-sell my web access history to
a 3rd party service managed outside Australia could well be illegal.

I hope Telstra doesn't just get let off the hook for this.

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damian2000
When I heard Telstra, I thought - yeah that sounds about right. A truly
disgusting monopolist.

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Smerity
It's amazing that Telstra can still surprise me with their business practices.

For those outside of Australia, Telstra have a reputation somewhere between
GoDaddy and Facebook. They came to power as a legal monopoly, originally
government run, and own the majority of all copper lines in Australia. Telstra
was then privatised in three different stages and proceeded to bully the
industry.

For years the highest speed ADSL1 connection you could receive was 1.5 Mbit/s
due to Telstra artificially limiting all companies who used their copper
lines. Only in the last half decade have they extended this to the normal 8
Mbit/s[1].

The idea that the data sent over to the US was "completely anonymised" is
laughable. Far more technically competent companies, like Netflix[2], have
made mistakes in their anonymisation procedures in the past -- I fail to see
how Telstra could avoid such a fate. If the data were ever released, it'd
likely end up more like the AOL incident[3].

[1]: [http://www.itwire.com/your-it-
news/entertainment/7027-austra...](http://www.itwire.com/your-it-
news/entertainment/7027-australia-breaks-through-15mbps-barrier-telstra-
launches-adsl-2)

[2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize#Privacy_concerns>

[3]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak>

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josephcooney
As a Telstra customer I'm kind of pissed off about this. I'll be contacting my
account rep to see what they have to say about it.

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emmelaich
Discussion here: [http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-
replies.cfm?t=1935438&#...</a>

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robryan
Despite all the criticism of the company, most who care about decent mobile
internet are using them because no other network comes close.

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dmboyd
Another reason to use https, (and to deny telcos the right to run root certs)

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ontoillogical
The ISP can still track what domain you're going to if you use https.

