Is your ISP selling your clickstream data ?

David Cancel, the CEO of Compete Inc revealed at the Open Data 2007 conference that (some) ISPs are selling so called clickstream data of their users to marketing companies like Compete Inc. Clickstream data refers to the sequence of websites visited including the time that the sites were viewed. This is however not all the information that the companies receive. They surely analyze the user base of the ISPs that are selling the clickstream data which can be used to create complex marketing strategies for certain states or even regions in the United States.

We all remember that AOL released similar data last year using a weak method to anonymize the data. It was possible to identify certain users that were conducting specific searches. The exact nature of the data that is being sold to the marketing companies is not known yet. Experts estimate that the ISPs receive about $0.40 per month per user which totals to $4.80 per year.

An ISP with 10000 users would gain $48000 per year for the data that they sell. Enough money to forget about the privacy rights of their customers. The question remains: how can you find out if your ISP is selling clickstream data ? You could try and call them and ask them directly but the guys from the hotlines probably do not even know what clickstream data is. A better way would be to call a representative or a official data protection officer.

The only possible way to counter this would be to use encryption, specifically encrypted vpns that make it impossible for the ISP to log what their users are doing.