Should You Be Worried About Your Broadband?

One of the UK's biggest broadband providers has owned up to snooping around its users web habits

, all in the name of safety of course. The purpose: a new anti-malware system.

The activity was first noticed and reported by a user of the broadband provider's community forums who had noticed the addresses of two radius severs following them to every webpage they had visited.

After some lively discussion between members over the weekend, Monday morning came and so did a statement from the company which confirmed that the broadband provider had been following some users.

The ISP said it was developing new security and parental control services for its users which would provide them with greater protection.

The company stressed that this was all being done in the name of customer safety and and improved online experience, something which had been requested through customer feedback.

So, who should you believe and should you be worried about your broadband?

Luckily for broadband users - home and mobile broadband alike - the situation on this is improving and information and statistics are becoming easier to obtain.

Eager to deflect claims that the system is a clone of Phorm, a surreptitious advertising scheme which many providers had previously badmouthed, providers are now more eager to release details of what information the anti-malware system will look at and what it will do with that data.

The first part of most systems compares the URL of a visited website to two lists, a blacklist of malware infected sites and a white list of sites already approved safe.

If a URL is found on neither list the system then requests a scan and the servers follow a user to the page to check it out.

Much of the concern has revolved around the fact that at present there is no way of opting-out of the system.

In this case it's worth checking when you look at broadband deals for opt-in only clauses.

One other area of concern raised about the system is that it is operated by Huawei a Chinese firm and much of the data collected for analysis will run via Huawei severs in China.

In general, look out for providers whose scanning engines receive no knowledge about which users visited what sites (e.g. telephone number, account number, IP address) and whether they store this data.

by: Neil Hawkins

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