[Linux-aus] bigpond now uses proxy servers to spy on 'us'

James Turnbull james at lovedthanlost.net
Tue Jul 4 07:04:04 UTC 2006


Rohan M. wrote:
> To whom it may concern,
>
> I would like Telstra/Bigpond to please explain why in the last 48 hours or
> so they have installed proxy servers on behalf of "akamai technologies"
> which is now routing all of my http (web) traffic through these proxy
> servers. I presume at very least all of Darwin's broadband traffic is also
> routed through these proxies.
>
>   
Bigpond (Cable at least) have had transparent proxies for years.  
Terrible at admitting they exist when trouble-shooting problems but they 
are there.  Certainly Bigpond aren't the only carrier/provider to use 
them or Akamai - I am fairly sure PIPE, iinet, Internode and Netspace 
and a few other players have all installed Akamai cluster proxies a 
while back.

Additionally, there are a lot of other ways (usage meters for example) 
that Bigpond (and other providers) have been monitoring your traffic for 
years.  I don't think there is an ISP in the country that doesn't in 
some way keep track of where you browse to. 

To be honest unless you can prove the provider has in some way breached 
the Privacy Act through the use (and not just collection - check your 
contract - I think you'll find Bigpond is allowed to collect some 
information as part of service provision) of the data then there is 
little you can do to stop them.

Regards

James Turnbull

-- 
James Turnbull <james at lovedthanlost.net>
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