Your Rights

Charter Communications, the fourth largest Internet Service Providers in the United States, has reportedly begun telling some of its 2.7 million broadband users that they'll be monitoring every web site they visit to help web advertisers deliver ... targeted ads. The web-tracking program, dubbed an "enhancement" by Charter, is a pilot program set to begin next month and it appears to be similar to a targeted advertising system in the U.K. developed by Phorm, a London company alleged to have spyware roots. Charter plans to test its program in four markets: Ft. Worth, Texas; San Luis Obispo, ... (view more)

The Federal Communications Commission has begun hearings into net neutrality, the concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally, without representatives of the major Internet and telephone companies. Comcast, AT ... (view more)

New York's state legislature passed a budget earlier this month that includes a provision requiring online retailers to collect all applicable taxes at the behest of the state. Individuals shopping online had previously been able to dodge paying ... local taxes since online retailers were not responsible for their collection. Instead, New York as well as most other states require individuals to voluntarily declare items bought from out of state retailers, in their annual income tax filings. The 'Use Tax' puts the onus on the individual to pay their owing taxes on items purchased. In reality, ... (view more)

Sometimes, there's a good reason that the "privacy policy" has been placed almost invisibly at the bottom of the page, and that when you click on the link, it presents you with a mountain of microscopic legal-like gobbledygook in a document 24-pages ... long. The reason the policy is placed in a small, out-of-the-way location is simple: the site owners don't really want you to realize that you've just agreed to allow any information they collect about you or your PC to be distributed across the Internet for the rest of your life. But you'll miss that because you won't bother to read beyond the ... (view more)

Every marketer on the Internet understands that targeting is the name of the game. Better information about website visitors or email lists will produce higher advertising yields. However, there's now a growing group of lawmakers that want to limit ... that practice. In fact, some want to make using personal data for advertising, or "behavioral tracking", a crime. All the ruckus seems to have been started by Richard L. Brodsky, a little-known assemblyman in the New York state legislature who recently introduced a bill that would make the use of personal information for advertising a criminal ... (view more)

The Pandora Internet radio service will stop broadcasting to British listeners after the 15 January thanks to a dispute over royalty payments. The site plays music based on the listener's favourite artists or tracks. It analyses songs for musical ... styles, pace, tone and instrument to find similarities between tracks. Users can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to each song they hear (similar to the way TiVo works), decisions that directly affect what new songs will be played in future. The idea is to create a radio station customized for the individual listener. In the United States, licensing ... (view more)

Amidst all the recent hoopla over Amazon's proprietary Kindle reader and the 90,000 ebooks available for it, the popular press has overlooked an product using more than 15 times the number of ebooks being made available through Amazon. The Million ... Book Project, led by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, now offers through its Universal Library the complete texts of more than 1.5 million digitized books, with all available over the Internet for free. With a complimentary text reader, no less. (Source: ulib.org ) To understand how large an effort that is, keep in mind that a typical high ... (view more)

A French watchdog is attempting to close down eBay's site in the country, claiming it is failing to protect consumers. The Council of Sales, which regulates auctions, argues that the site should have to follow the same rules as 'bricks and mortar' ... auction houses in France. These rules, passed in 2000 and designed to clamp down on scams, require all auctioneers to have a government permit. The Council says it's put together a series of complaints about shady practices by eBay sellers, including selling a photocopy as an original 18th century painting, or simply scanning images from auction ... (view more)

The movie download site CinemaNow.com is partnering with Sonic, makers of the Roxio CD and DVD burning software, to allow consumers to legally burn movies bought online for playback in DVD and HD-DVD players. Curt Mavis, president and CEO of ... CinemaNow, said that his company is, "pleased to unlock a vast collection of previously unavailable content for consumers to instantly access in the home and burn to DVD." (Source: I4U News ) The deal would seem to solve the problem of transferring downloaded content from computer to television. Several products are already on the market to accomplish ... (view more)

Yesterday, Canadian ISP (Internet Service Provider) Bell Sympatico admitted that it is restricting bandwidth access during "peak hours" to customers who are using p2p (peer-to-peer) networks such as Gnutella, Bit Torrent and Limewire. (Source: ... Betanews.com ) The company admitted to the action on its online customer support forums. "Bell Sympatico has launched a solution to enhance the online customer experience and improve Internet performance for all our customers during peak periods of Internet usage with the introduction of Internet Traffic Management," a company representative stated on ... (view more)