ISPs Sell Browsing History

Last year, AOL created an uproar when they released millions of search records to the general public for research purposes. This data was not as anonymous as they thought, and several people at AOL lost their jobs after the New York Times showed how the data could be used to identify individual searchers. Apparently not just search data, but entire user clickstreams are being sold by ISPs.

At the 2007 Open Data Conference last week, David Cancel, the CTO of the web market research firm Compete, disclosed that Internet Service Providers sell their customer’s clickstream data for about 40 cents/month per user to various buyers. Compete uses this clickstream data, as well as data complied from other sources to provide webpage “"snapshots":http://snapshot.compete.com/www.omninerd.com” and other services. Other companies, like Hitwise, also use this information to report traffic trends such as the recent announcement on a traffic increase at social networking sites. Cancel says he knows of about a dozen major buyers of this clickstream data and it likely includes the government as well as business. While ISPs have been doing this for years, few users know about it because it is hidden deep within the User Agreements that no one reads. Attendees at the Open Data Conference predicted that at some point this clickstream market would gain media attention and create a "consumer firestorm."