Is Your ISP Injecting Ads on websites you visit ?

Internet users have to cope with all kinds of things when they are online. Malware, security vulnerabilities, tracking, phishing, traffic shaping and some, as it seems (thanks Dante for the link), even with Internet Service Providers that inject ads of their own on websites that are visited by their customer. That’s what researchers at the University of Washington have discovered after analyzing data sent by 50000 computers in July and August of 2007.

This brings up some interesting moral but also legal questions. Website owners have no idea, and obviously no control, that ads are displayed on their websites. The problem here is that they probably do not have the means to verify that ads are displayed either unless someone would come up with a log that showed which websites have been affected by this practice. Customers however are on the other end of the spectrum. Their traffic is meddled with and are shown ads that are probably specifically targeted to increase the success rate.

Some ISP names have been published by the researchers already: RedMoon, Mesa Networks, MetroFi and XO Communications with the last being one of the largest ISPs in the country and only in that list because of a smaller reseller according to an XO spokesman. It will be interesting to access the full list of Internet Service Providers that inject ads in websites without their customers consent.