TalkTalk Follows Users Without Permission
TalkTalk Telecom Group, which offers mobile, home phone, broadband and television services, has been caught following the movements of their customers on the internet. This comes only a couple weeks after they joined other internet service providers (ISPs) in challenging the privacy concerns of the Digital Economy Act.
This issue was discovered by some TalkTalk’s customers. They noticed that IP addresses from Opal Telecom, which is one of the company’s subsidiaries, were following them to every website they went to. Some of the users were able to replicate the process and found the spying tactics in their logs.
Of course this brought on a series of complaints made to the company. It was after this that they revealed they are developing some new parental control and security services, which they say will provide more protection for their users.
Despite this good announcement, this doesn’t prevent the new monitoring system, which is from Chinese company Huawei, from ’spying’ on users. This is actually the whole purpose of the system - following the customers’ moves, recording the websites that are visited and then comparing them to websites that are known to have malware. TalkTalk promises that, although they know the sites their users are visiting in as little as 30 seconds, it’s all for protection.
The customers were never told that they would be followed in their online activities, as TalkTalk says that the surveillance wasn’t intended to record personal data. Now that users know about it, they can opt out of participating, according to the company.
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And where exactly IS this opt out option ?
It doesn`t exist.