Generally I hope that this sort of data mining will lead to discoveries like "Hey, lots of people search for 'Princess Leia spanking video.' Its perfectly normal. Don't worry."
There's a funny hacker-convention video I watched recently (and maybe even linked to in comments?) where the hacker guy VNCs into his stolen computer and finds that the guy who has his machine is doing some hilarious searches, which indicate quite clearly the stealy dude's preference for large posteriors.
3: oh, I think that's Zoz's Defcon talk.
When my computer was stolen, recovered by the FBI, and returned to me, I discovered that the thief had a multi-generatonal family that dressed very attractively for a wedding; played online dominoes; and bookmarked movie schedules in San Juan. Boringest thief EVER.
The real implications are you r local broadband monopoly will be much better at price discrimination as more and more of the interweb becomes proprietary and 'bundled'. Your information wont belong to you, those you will be able to trent it. IP is the new feudalism
I'm really not looking forward to the coming transformation of the internet (in the U.S. at least) into cable TV.
Of course since the web send to be turning into facebook, I say goss riddance
Of course since the web send to be turning into facebook, I say goss riddance
3: oh, I think that's Zoz's Defcon talk.
My takeaway from that talk was that Zoz is a dick.
As for the OP, there was a bit of a scandal in the UK a couple of years back when BT trialled a deep packet inspection system developed by a company named Phorm. Cunningly, they didn't tell the affected users they were doing this. This is illegal in the UK, though the police declined to press charges, arguing customers had given implied consent, which is a bad joke. Still, at least the resultant uproar caused BT to drop their plans to apply Phorm's software to its entire customer base on an opt-out basis.
Actually, I just checked and according to The Register, the CPS is still considering whether or not to prosecute. Though if they haven't by now, it seems highly unlikely they ever will.