The IT Nerd

According to this post by Michael Geist, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (which Geist is a part of) has filed a privacy complaint (warning: PDF) against Bell Canada over their throttling practices because it uses Deep Packet Inspection to throttle customers and they don’t tell their customers that they are using Deep Packet Inspection:

“Neither Bell’s Terms of Service, its Privacy Statement, its Code of Fair Information Practices, nor its FAQs state that Bell will use Sympatico subscribers’ personal information to examine the nature of the data packets they send or receive, or that it will use the information garnered from this examination to limit their ability to use the Internet at certain periods.”

The use of DPI is a big deal as it has a broad range of uses that should scare any user of the Internet. The media has picked this story up. CBC for example has a story on it on their website about this story.

This comes on the same day an interesting post appeared on DSLreports.com that seems to indicate that Bell lied to the CRTC about what they throttle.

Hopefully the CRTC is watching and will act accordingly.

This entry was posted on May 12, 2008 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, Canada, CRTC, Net Neutrality, Throttling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.